Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread:
Fighting Hunger in Our Own Backyard

Workshops

Each workshop will last 45 minutes. All four will be held concurrently. You will attend one workshop during the first session on Saturday and another workshop during the second session.

When registering for Annual Meeting + Harris-Evans Conference, please indicate your first, second and third choice of a workshop. Every effort will be made to place you in your top choices, but understand the workshop organizers may have to assign workshops based on space constraints. Your workshops will be announced at Annual Meeting.

Here are the how-to workshops, whose information is designed for sharing with your fellow parishioners. The size of a congregation doesn’t matter; all communities have hunger.

Backpack Buddies: Backpack Buddies is focused on school children who depend on the school breakfast and lunch programs for the majority of their food during the school week. This program involves filling backpacks with healthy foods and taking them to a school, where they are given to the children so they’ll have nutritious meals for the weekend. Linda Dohme, member of the ECW branch at St. Michael’s Church in Raleigh, will lead this workshop. She has helped organize and run Backpack Buddies at St. Michael’s for over a year.

Community Gardening: Participants will explore the various types of community gardens, and the benefits and the challenges associated with each. The presenters will be Wren Blessing and John Hughes from Anathoth Garden in Cedar Grove, NC. This community garden is a faith-based garden devoted to restoring peace to a community and good food to those who need it. It is a church-supported, member-based garden that encourages the development of community ties, the production of food and an understanding of the “theology of eating.”

How to Set Up a Food Pantry: Staff members of the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle will explain how to establish or expand a food pantry all the while keeping community needs and municipal laws in mind. Staffing with volunteers and stocking a pantry with must-haves will be covered.

Nutritious Meals on a Budget: Inter-Faith Food Shuttle staffers will also lead this group in the particulars of their organization’s newest initiative. Called Operation Frontline, it involves helping people lead healthier lives by sponsoring classes about nutritious meals and snacks for families with limited incomes. Topics covered include budgeting, menu planning, shopping and tasty, creative cooking.