North Ridgeville Review The Community That Cares
By Heather Kaesgen
Since the shut down in March, North Ridgeville Community Care has managed to stay open, serving our clients throughout the pandemic. The increase in new families each week keeps rising, most never receiving food from a pantry before. We are serving approximately 60 families a week. Since the shutdown, we have served over 2,500 people and distributed over 100,000 pounds of food.
Many of our clients are senior citizens, and they are nervous about shopping. They have health problems, along with physical constraints. We have managed to keep most of them out of the stores by providing them with two weeks of groceries and household items each time they visit us.
Thanks to our sewing volunteers, ALL of the kids are masked up for school. Mary Elchlinger, Bev Behrns, Barbara Kramer, and Jean Beckner have been sewing up a storm. They have been making masks for our clients and all of you since the pandemic has started. With all their donations from the masks, they have donated over $3,800. We can’t thank these ladies enough and all of you for generously giving to this great cause.
We are so fortunate to have such a wonderful group of volunteers that run our Community Care Garden. They will have planted, cultivated and harvested over 4,000 pounds of food for our clients.
We are already thinking Christmas, so if you would like to adopt a family or donate an unwrapped toy to brighten a child’s Christmas, let us know. Contact us at the center (440-353-9716) or via email (heather@nrcommcare.org).
Our most significant need right now continues to be monetary. We are purchasing food from Second Harvest, which not only allows us to get exactly what we need but is already sorted and ready to go out to our clients.
The thing we miss the most is our volunteers. One of our volunteers, Margaret Brooks-Terry, had an ingenious idea to transfer the calls daily to a volunteer’s home. Margaret, along with Donna Phelan and Pat Kyle continue to do this allowing us to concentrate on distribution to our clients. This has worked out well the past few months! We look forward to the day our volunteers are able to come back into the building. We are taking this unique opportunity to rearrange, clean, and paint the center. We can’t thank John Kolb enough for his hard work in making this happen. He is volunteering his time and talent to make sure the center looks meticulously brand new! He also was able to help us secure the paint from Sherwin Williams as a donation!
We look forward to a new 2021 where (hopefully) our doors will be open, and we can welcome everyone inside to our new and improved building. Please stay safe and well!
Thank you for always being a community that CARES!
