By EVA HANEGRAAFF
NORTH READING — In the small, white building next to the Union Congregational Church sits the North Reading Food Pantry. Set up like a supermarket, clients from North Reading or those who attend a North Reading church are invited to choose from their variety of food items.
The food pantry is constantly taking donations, necessitating the difficult and time consuming process of checking expiration dates and sorting the food items.
Fourth- and fifth-grade students across the three elementary schools in North Reading learned about the process of running a food pantry through their experience while volunteering there on a field trip with the YMCA After School Programs at each school. When students from the Batchelder School YMCA program attended, their first task was to carry all the food that they had been collecting throughout the week to the food pantry, about a five minute walk away. “I brought a big bag,” fourth-grader Callie Donovan explained, highlighting how this only made the walk more difficult.
Once they arrived at the food pantry, their next job was to sort through all the food and put it away in the correct spot. Donovan said, “We organized all the food by [expiration] dates into the pantry.” The food pantry volunteers sought to keep the food with the closer expiration date more accessible, storing the items with a longer shelf life or a later expiration date in shelves upstairs to be brought down when the more timely items ran out. Fourth-grader Rex Swiatocha explained, “We want the lower expiration dates downstairs so people buy those first.”
From their experience, the students gained a lot as some misconceptions and differing understandings were brought to light. “There’s a lot of food in here and a lot more than I would usually see,” Donovan observed. Many of the students were also surprised by the fact that the food pantry had more than just food. It also stocks soap, shampoo, conditioner, diapers, and so many more products that people might need in their everyday lives.
“We wanted to give the YMCA kids at all the elementary schools the opportunity to see that volunteering is an option and helping out in our community is important,” said Sam Messina, site director of the Batchelder YMCA program. He added, “Hopefully we’ll be able to come back and do it again and continue this trend of helping out in our town.”
For both the elementary school students and the food pantry volunteers, it is clear that this experience was an incredibly positive one.
“My favorite part about volunteering is sorting the food so I can help people that really need it,” Swiatocha said, and it was incredibly clear he meant it, because before he agreed to leave, he first made sure to triple check that there was really nothing else he could do to help.