Sweet Home Emergency Ministries announced last week that its Manna Meals program has
been discontinued for the foreseeable future.
All other SHEM services remain available to the community.
The emergency food pantry, located at 1115 Long Street, continues to serve clients on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays from 9 to 11:30 a.m., except for the second Saturday of each month.
“Everything with the SHEM pantry is still the same,” said Cindy Rice, pantry manager. “We’re still having issues getting volunteers, the same as everybody else is, but we are making efforts to connect more closely with other food resources here in town.”
The pantry is closed on major holidays, including Christmas, New Year’s Day, and
Thanksgiving, as well as during extreme weather conditions such as snow or ice. If the Sweet
Home School District closes due to weather, SHEM will also be closed.
SHEM’s pantry continues to offer food boxes, limited financial assistance, and Carmen’s Closet,
which provides household items, hygiene products, and clothing.
For more information, call 541-367-6504.
Manna Meals ‘Suspension’
The Manna Meals program served the community three nights a week for many years and
provided more than 140,000 meals over the past decade, hosted by the United Methodist Church.
The program was closed due to an aging volunteer base and a lack of staffing needed to sustain meal service.
“What I’m calling it right now is a suspension, not a termination,” said Linda Rowton, who headed the effort for many years.
The Manna Meals program began at the Methodist Church in 2004 as an outgrowth from the Dinners with Daisy program that began in the 1980s at the Sweet Home Senior Center, headed by Daisy Ashton, Rowton said.
The program has provided free hot meals three times a week for decades. But Rowton said the volunteer base has declined and so has the client population.
“The big thing was finding responsible volunteers, people that would commit,” she said, noting that would-be volunteers too often did not return after their initial service.
At a meeting last November called by city leaders to discuss the hunger situation in Sweet Home, Rowton told the crowd of some 40 representatives of local aid groups and others that often there are only two volunteers preparing, serving and cleaning up after meals. The youngest of their volunteer corps, she said, is “60-something.”
Another problem, she said last week, is that the clientele has declined. At one point there were at least 20 people showing up for meals, and the Manna staff for a while was preparing 40 meals for residents of the FAC homeless shelter.
Rowton said she was “unsure of the details,” but the FAC meal distribution has stopped and demand for on-site meals has also declined. She noted that the process of planning, preparing and serving or packaging meals has demanding, and it was “a little disheartening” when the response was tepid.
“A lot of times we haven’t had even 20,” she said. “We began to question the need.”
She said she recently saw an obituary for one faithful attendee, who used to ride her bike to Manna each week.
“The old group is declining,” she said. “That’s kind of the story.”
Rowton said organizers have always known that Manna has been about more than just food.
“It’s a social thing for a lot of people,” she said. “A lot of those people don’t need the food, but they need someone to eat with. It’s about community.”
Rowton said she and other Manna workers need to take breaks for personal reasons, but often have not been able to because they lacked backup.
So they’ve decided to suspend the operation until April.
Then, she said, she would like to restart the meals but limit them, at least initially, to Wednesday nights, which was the original schedule for Dinners with Daisy and early Manna operations.
“We struggled.” she said. “It was not an easy decision.”
Another key, she said, will be getting enough volunteers to staff separate teams that can handle meals once a month – or more, but only if volunteers want to commit more often.
“That way we’d have separate groups doing the planning, preparing and cleaning up, so no one group is tasked with doing it every week,” she said. “Four teams – everybody would do it once a month.
Anyone interested in volunteering should contact SHEM, she said, and they will be contacted when organizers return.
“We’ve had a couple of news volunteers who were really, really good,” she said. “They were people I felt confident would carry on. But we need more than just one person each night to make it happen.
“We’ll start slow like that, and see what happens.”