We are sorta playing 6 degrees of the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.
We head to the Easthampton Community Center to speak with the folx feeding "Whoville" at one of the largest and most expansive food pantries in the area. As they give out turkeys for the upcoming holidays, we get the full scope of the center’s operations by chatting with some of the patrons, some of the volunteers, and the executive director coordinating all of it, Robin Bialecki.
This season’s Toy for Joy campaign has just started, but the program has a legacy of bringing together local people and businesses together for more than a century. We chat with Major Donald Spencer and Danielle LaTaille of the Salvation Army about their goals for this year, how they’ve managed to adapt their services to the needs of the community, and how some of those services actually connect to the offices of the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.
And, if we go just a little further out, we learn how the folx rescuing fabric from landfills in Turners Falls connect to the food bank, as well. Because, every year Monte needs a new costume to walk all 43 miles in, and every year the people at Swanson’s Fabric valiantly rise to the task.
