The Sudbury Community Food Pantry celebrated its 27th anniversary in 2017. The 89 volunteers, contributed 6,351 hours, in order, to serve our clients. Your commitment and dedication has enabled us to aid people who are struggling financially by providing them with wholesome food and personal care items that promote healthy living and doing so in a manner that respects their dignity. I have heard on numerous occasions from my peers in other towns that clients of their pantry have described the Sudbury food pantry as a place with a friendly and welcoming environment.
From coordinating the volunteers, monitoring the pantry answering machine, stocking the shelves, picking up from: donation boxes at Sudbury Farms and Shaw’s, purchases from The Greater Boston Food Bank, delivering them to the pantry, distributing the food, registering the clients, taking cardboard to the landfill, to processing the food collected in the various food drives and deliveries from the GBFB, you have enabled The Sudbury Community Food Pantry to become an exceptional organization.
2017 was a year with surprises. With the economy growing day by day and the unemployment numbers low, we expected the amount of people seeking help from our pantry would be down, considering 2015-2016 were flat. To our surprise The demand was up sharply, starting with January which was almost as busy as November which is traditionally our busiest month. In 2017 we served 909 different families an increase of 6.8% over 2016 and we had 3,105 client visits an increase of 9.95%. over 2016. (see graph below) We added 394 new clients in 2017 while 336 no-longer needed our services.
You can download our full report here.