23rd July 2013
This morning the three of us travelled to nearby Statesville to visit the Community College. The Director of the college is a Fairview member. He gave us a tour round the lovely campus (we weren’t surprised to learn that at one time it had been the sister college to Davidson, with Statesville being the female college and Davidson the male college.)
I was expecting a Community College to be like our Sixth Form Colleges or a further education college. But this one had a real feel of a university to it. Anne was very impressed with the nursing program.
We then went to lunch with our host at Statesville Rotary Club. There was a talk from the local Christian Foodbank about what they are doing and their new premises. Very interesting. Unlike the Foodbank back home, people are allowed to pick goods off the shelf rather than just being given a bag of food selected by Foodbank. (There must be some restriction on what people can select, though this was not made clear.)
The speaker also spoke of an initiative whereby they have worked with local farmers and gardeners encouraging them to grow an extra row of vegetables. (A very Biblical approach - 22 ‘“When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you. I am the Lord your God.”’) This is working really well so that they can now offer fresh vegetables to clients.
They have aspirations to set up a community garden not only to grow veg for the project but to give allotments to local people and show them how to grow their own vegetables. (Most places here have much bigger gardens than at home – though typically they are mostly just lawn. So it would make sense for people in need to have vegetable plots.)
On getting back to Mooresville, Anne and I went to visit the soup kitchen. This is probably a misnomer as it is much more than a soup kitchen. I’ll call it the soup kitchen for ease, but as you’ll see it does a lot more.
The kitchen opens around 11am each day and provides meals for around 100+ people who call in at that point. That in itself would be laudable. But the Kitchen also cooks hundreds of meals each day which are then frozen and distributed to the needy. The produce for these meals comes from donations from supermarkets and restaurants as well as from local people. This is part of something called Second Harvest.
The kitchen operates from a former car parts warehouse and has a full catering kitchen complete with walk in fridge and larder. Each day around 40 volunteers help with the project in some way. Most are from local churches but not all. In fact the man who showed us round explained how a proportion of unchurched like to get involved as they feel they are helping the community.
And this reminded me of something Tony Campolo said at Greenbelt last year about we in the church not forgetting that there are many good people out there who would not call themselves Christians yet who demonstrate Christ - like love. We need to engage with such people and gently show them that the Spirit of Christ is within them.
The man showing us round said a large number of the people who receive food are not the down and outs and homeless that many might expect. The clients are often working people and their families but they are struggling to make ends meet. We got on to a discussion about minimum wage and living wage and how in the UK there is a campaign to provide a living wage.
Our guide (who I know has been a very senior executive with a number of major companies) said he tended to agree. And he mention several large US companies (retailers mainly) who consistently seek to offer low prices to customers but this comes at driving wages down and putting staff on part time contracts etc. He found this wrong and cited the practice as one reason why people struggle financially as more and more employers seem to adopt a similar model.
I was very impressed with the set up. In some senses it is a larger (well much larger) concept of community kitchen back at home. The difference being that this is daily and that several churches work together to put it on.
A wonderful project.
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