Seaford resident finds purpose with Long Island cares

Seaford resident Lorraine Jewel truly understands the crucial need for food pantries and thus providing humanitarian aid, experiencing the critical endeavor first-hand.

Jewel volunteers at Long Island Cares, Inc., a food bank with 200 sites scattered throughout America and dedicated to feeding individuals and families in their communities. The food pantries openly embrace community volunteers to assist them in delivering the needed services to feed the hungry on Long Island. Through this partnership, volunteers have met new people, traveled to different places, and opened the doors to explore new ideas. These activities have come to alter the outlook of someone’s ability to act and give back to the community.

Jewel is one many volunteers at Long Island Cares, displaying unfailing devotion to her work in the year and a half that she’s spent at the food bank in Bethpage.

She discovered the organization through volunteers on Facebook, and the topic and assignments intrigued Jewel to learn even more. She then reached out to a friend who knew someone working at the food banks to provide a better insight into how they operate. Jewel said she soon realized this was something she wanted to become involved in.

Her work as a volunteer at the organization’s food pantry involves a variety of different tasks, including helping customers to shop for food at a mini-supermarket. Jewel takes them down each aisle and shows them the food they have on their shelves, but first the volunteers need to know how many family members they’re buying for to break down how much food they can buy. The task is not always the easiest, but necessary to have enough food for the next customer, Jewel said.

Restocking the shelves of the pantry and picking up deliveries to be placed in their stock room are the other important tasks that volunteers perform, she said.

“It’s a pretty much variety of food in all the categories, like the protein category, the green category and fresh produce,” Jewel said. “They seek to get a little bit of all the nutritional foods that they can get for the people who come into the food bank so that they have a balance of good food to eat for them and their families — and also to have food for their pets. They rely — and we rely — on people donating an assortment of foods, wholesome good foods.”

Administrators at Long Island Cares are determined to combat food insecurities and sensitivities in the country through their food banks. Michele Jackson, the organization’s manager of retail rescue and distribution, revealed that the organization has been trying to utilize disregarded food into soil for their two gardening bed areas in Hauppauge and Huntington Station. But as of late, the garden beds haven’t been large enough to hold the amount of food waste brought to them.

However, according to Jackson, they have multiple contracts with both the Emergency Food Assistance Program, and The New York State Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program, providing them with funds each year to purchase menu items that are available to them.

The menu contains a list of food their facilities need to be delivered to them. The menu is supposed to follow nutritional guidelines, with oversight by the state to make sure that the things available on the menu will not contain any poor ingredients or affect any individuals with allergies. More than 300 agencies and 500 program locations have now partnered with Long Island Cares.

“They work very hard on reaching out to different organizations and getting food that’s low in sodium or gluten-free,” Jewel said. “It’s always relying on outside sources to accommodate us in our need to supply the people coming in with these health issues.”

After spending a year and a half as a volunteer, Jewel has seen the organization’s mission being carried out by uniting communities in the act of giving. She has seen how hard volunteers work to bring awareness about the hardships families endure and why donating food is desperately needed for these families in the future.

“Depending on the day of the week, the challenge is being able to put food on somebody’s table because our shelves are never always packed,” Jewel said on the challenges as a volunteer. “There are days we can be packed for that one month and we have more than enough food to supply the neighborhood. Then there are certain weeks and months when the shelves are barren.”

Jackson expressed high praise for the volunteer work Jewel has produced.

“She’s volunteered mainly in the food pantry, but she’s gone to each of my locations,” Jackson said of Jewel. “She’s gone and volunteered in the Gus’s Grocery area, as well as the Bethpage food pantry. Her work ethic is just ‘go, go, go!’ and not stopping until there’s nothing left to do.”