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WCRN Chester County Food Cupboard
5th February 2024
Author: Lauren Brimhall

Volunteering with Chester County Food Cupboard

If there was ever a group of people out there who really knew how to make volunteering fun, it’s the West Chester Referral Network (WCRN)! As President of WCRN and someone who has personally attended all three of our groups volunteer meetups since WCRN’s inception in September 2022, I cannot say enough about all the amazing things these events have to offer.

1.) Genuine bonding amongst our members working together to achieve assigned goals.

2.) A shared sense of accomplishment as a group at completion.

3.) Building lasting friendships that make for the most heartfelt referrals.

WCRN Chester County Food Cupboard

Our experience with volunteering at the Chester County Food Cupboard was certainly no exception. We were tasked with putting together bagged breakfast/lunch meals for school children whose parents were struggling. We were each assigned jobs on the assembly line, and we had a blast trying to see how many meal bags we could get done in the two hours we were assigned.

We came up with silly nicknames for each other like the two “bag ladies” at the start of the line (Donna & Joanne), the “milk man,” (Noah) who delivered the items that needed restocking (including lots of milk!), and I was of course “the flakey one,” because I had cornflakes and canned soup, haha. I heard just as much fun and laughter coming from the left side of the line, and by the end whoever was standing next to you was probably your new best friend.

WCRN Chester County Food Cupboard

We also WAY overachieved. The food bank only put out enough product to put together the 400 meal bags they hoped we could get done in two hours. We finished those 400 bags with about 45 minutes to spare so we got to building the next round of boxes and restocking all the materials to get more done. All in all we were able to assemble, pack, and palletize 512 meal bags! Karen Mudgett, who works for the food bank and was our gracious host for the opportunity, told us if we had been set up for more time and hadn’t had issues with some defective bags we might have been able to break their record of $1,000 bags in 3 hours! One thing that was very apparent was the hard-working nature of all of our group members and we all walked away brimming with a sense of accomplishment and bondedness.

Huge thanks to what were ultimately our ten total volunteers not including myself! Donna Walter, Jeffrey Nixon, Kristin Farrell Tantorski, Joanna Smith, Heather Gregg and Charles, Noah Oettel, Joe Cosgrove, Tom Nestor!

Can’t wait for the next one!

Interested in becoming a member?

If this sounds right for you, we hope you’ll decide to join us and meet us all in person at your earliest opportunity!

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