The Greene County Action Resource Center is making the final push through the holidays.

ARC Manager Shirley Haupert tells Raccoon Valley Radio when they started seeing the amount of households needing to use the food pantry earlier this year, they had to devise a way to become more efficient. She says one way was re-configuring how clients could choose from over a dozen different kinds of meats. Haupert points out they used to put the meats on a table for people to casually choose from, which she notes wasn’t a quick enough process.

“So they have their meat choice sheet, and they know how many they’re allowed to pick. We have this sheet that we give to the gals (volunteers) who take care of packaging the meat up. So when they (the clients) get through getting their canned goods, then they walk by where the meat is, they have their bags already made up, and they put them on their cart, and they load them up.” 

Haupert says there is consistently a line of vehicles that stretches out past their road at least 30 minutes before they are open every Wednesday. She is thankful for the volunteers that help when the food pantry is open those days.

“Our volunteers are so good about helping to get the stuff stocked on the shelves and getting the freezers emptied so it’s ready to go, that we aren’t wasting a lot of time.” 

Haupert believes that the days of averaging 20 households per week at the food pantry are gone and serving 35-40 households is their new normal.