With the holiday season quickly approaching, officials from the Petal Children’s Task Force are set to hand out 350 Thanksgiving boxes to needy families in the area.
The boxes will be distributed beginning at 8:30 a.m. November 18 at the task force headquarters, 314 South George Street in Petal. To receive a box, individuals must have the orange card that was given out during pre-registration for the boxes; additional boxes are not available at this time.
“We want to see families eat together, and God has blessed us so much, and the community has been behind us, supporting us with all this,” said Demaris Lee, executive director of the task force. “We just feel like this is what God’s wanting us to do, and we want to do it.
“We want for families to be able to be together and eat together.”
Boxes will consist of everything a family needs for a Thanksgiving feast – including a ham – along with other items to stock groceries in the home, such as milk and eggs.
“Milk, cereal, onions – they’ll get all of that for their Thanksgiving meal,” Lee said. “There will be green beans, cake mix, icing, flour, cranberry sauce.
“We’ll have cornmeal in the box; we’ll have cream of mushroom soup. It’ll be corn and green beans, carrots, all that. They’ll get a nice, big box of food.”
As it is, task force officials will be short on food items because of a lack of availability. The biggest example of that is peanut butter, which Lee said has become too expensive to afford.
“We can’t afford to go buy that big thing at Sam’s of peanut butter, and pay nine dollars for two jars at $4.50 a piece,” Lee said. “There’s a shortage on a lot of the food; we have food ordered that doesn’t ever come in. It’s going back to the economy right now, which is bad, and the supply chain coming down the loop, they’re not getting the food to be able to put in the grocery stores so people can buy it.
“It’s not the grocery stores’ fault, and it’s not the truck drivers, because they’re paying out their yang-yang for diesel. But we’re just not getting it; it starts with the warehouse that’s not getting it. We’re going to be short some items, but we just hope that everyone appreciates what they do have, because we’re doing our best to be able to get what we can get.”
The 350 boxes that are being distributed this year are pretty consistent with previous Thanksgiving years for the task force, which distributes monthly boxes to families in need.
“People get a monthly box from us, so it’s not like they don’t get a box,” Lee said. “So actually, for the month of November, they get two boxes, because they got their monthly box and they got their Thanksgiving box.”
Task force officials also plan to do Christmas boxes, although those packages will lean more toward breakfast and snack items for children rather than full meals.
“Kids will be out of school for two weeks, so it’ll be oatmeal, grits and snack items,” Lee said. “It won’t be as big as our Thanksgiving box, because we just won’t have the food.
“They’ll still get a nice box of food, but it’ll be geared more toward children.”
The Petal Children’s Task Force was started in 1989 by Lee and Jessie Rowell, with the aim of providing two Petal families with Christmas presents and food. Today, the organization serves more than 450 families in the Petal School District area.
The task force provides food assistance to clients once every 30 days, and helps out with school uniforms that are available at Petal First Baptist Church. In addition to their Thanksgiving and Christmas food boxes – which do not count as assistance for the month – the organization also helps with partial payments on utility bills once every six months.
The task force also gives out bags containing items like peanut butter and crackers to the homeless. The organization is assisted in that endeavor by other organizations like Petal United Methodist Church, which committed last year to put together 25 bags for the homeless for Christmas.
Anyone interested in receiving services from the task force is required to sign up at the South George Street office, which is owned by Asbury Methodist Church. For more information, call (601) 255-5578.
