Riverhead Rotary Club helps 200 families in need this holiday
The Riverhead High School cafeteria was abuzz on Friday afternoon as students, members of the Riverhead Rotary Club and other “Santa’s helpers” packed hundreds of holiday food baskets to donate to local churches, food pantries and nonprofits.
Working assembly-line fashion, with many dressed in their best holiday pajamas, students involved in the high school’s NJROTC program and Interact Club filled 200 cardboard baskets with more than $8,000 worth of food.
The Christmas dinners — funded by the rotary club for the past 25 years — included a turkey, stuffing, gravy, potatoes, green beans, corn, yams, cranberry sauce, margarine, whole milk and a loaf of bread.
“With the rising prices of groceries, food insecurity — which I think is worse now than when we did this several years ago — however we can help families have a Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday they celebrate, the better,” said Darrien Garay, senior director of development at Peconic Bay Medical Center and one of the organizers of the holiday food basket drive.
Each box also came with a red poinsettia donated by Kurt Van de Wetering of Ivy Acres in Baiting Hollow. Bruce Talmage, owner of Talmage Farm Agway, donated one of his trucks to help transport the goods from Stop and Shop. Bill Sanok, who works with the Long Island Cauliflower Association, helped with securing the potatoes.
The packed boxes were loaded onto trucks for the local food pantries and organizations to distribute to those in need. The recipients included the Butterfly Effect Project, Open Arms at Riverhead First Baptist Church, St. John’s Parish Outreach, Church of the Harvest, the Salvation Army and Joseph’s Storehouse at Living Water Church.
In addition to this holiday give back initiative, the Riverhead Rotary Club also delivered dozens of warm coats, clothes and toys to the Riverhead school district’s five elementary schools. The organization also gives $1,000 worth of gift cards each to the schools to distribute.
“We’re like an arm to a lot of the different food pantries,” said Pastor George Dupree. “We looked at [the Riverhead Rotary’s] impact in the community, which we’re always trying to reinforce, and realized that it’s a need that really is not going away. The response that we always get from everybody that coordinates, from the leadership in the schools, the pantries, and so forth, is overwhelmingly happy and thankful.”
