Chesapeake community bands together to help needy

Published 12:00 am Sunday, December 5, 2010

CHESAPEAKE — Soon the Chesapeake Community Center will bustle with the Christmas spirit as volunteers get ready for the annual holiday food basket and toy giveaway.

The giveaway will begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 22.

“We have been signing up people for the last month and a half,” Ruth Damron, director of the center, said. “We are giving away 600 baskets and toys for children. It is going to be a big deal. We have a lot more than last year and a whole lot less food.”

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One disappointment comes from area schools that last year provided 7,000 cans of food to go into those baskets. Damron got a phone call on Friday that that number will be down drastically.

“Maybe if we are lucky, we can get 2,000 cans,” she said.

However individual students have pooled their lunch money and allowances to donate to the center.

“We use that to buy turkeys and hams and meat products for Christmas,” Damron said.

The Chesapeake Middle School student council is conducting its annual peanut butter drive to add to all of those food baskets. The annual drive has been going on at the school for a number of years.

“We called the Community Center to find out what they are lacking for the holiday season,” Tina Wilcoxon, seventh grade reading teacher, said. “They said peanut butter is very difficult to come by. It is not donated very often.

“We have a grade-level competition and the top two grade levels get a reward for bringing in the most peanut butter.”

Another support for the food basket program has always come from the annual Thanksgiving Community Ecumenical Service that this year brought in $2,500.

Also for the past three years food has come from the Appalachian Mission Center of Father Ralph Beiting in Louisa, Ky. However, the center is unable to meet the needs to the same degree as before.

“They are having a difficult time getting the food in,” according to Father Charles Moran, pastor of St. Ann’s Church in Chesapeake.

“Three years ago I brought back a full truck,” Moran said. “Last year it was a half a truck. This time I might go down with a pickup truck.”

This season staff and students at Chesapeake Middle School are asking the community to help them with a new holiday drive. Instead of decorating the 12-foot tree always put up in the school’s cafeteria with traditional ornaments, the school is turning it into the Tree of Warmth.

“We want to decorate it with mittens, hats and gloves,” Jeri Stallo of the middle school staff, said. “We came up with the idea here in the office. That tree is so big why not do something useful with it.”

The school is asking for adult and children’s outerwear and those items will be donated to Safe Harbor, the domestic violence shelter in Ashland, Ky., and the Riverfront Ministries, that cares for the homeless at the Huntington, W.Va., riverbank.

“At the Riverfront it is mostly adults,” Stallo said. “And at Safe Harbor it is mostly children.”

Gloves, mittens and hats should be unwrapped and can be brought to the middle school office.

“We knew there was a need.” Stallo said. “We started this at the school but are sending flyers out and are hoping to get all the community involved.”