Amid increasing need, Warren County charitable organizations continue to collaborate to provide assistance in their communities, while a new program recently had its first successful giveaway of diapers and other supplies for young families.
Warren County Baby Grace held its first distribution Sept. 3, giving away more than 1,300 diapers and 56 bags of wipes. “Our priority is diapers and wipes, and then other than that it’s pretty much any baby and toddler essentials, whether that’s clothing, bottles, seasonal items,” said Katie Connors, local Baby Grace coordinator.
Connors added that more than twice as many families are already signed up for the next distribution, which will be Oct. 1 from 5 to 7 p.m at Esther House, located behind College United Methodist Church in Warrenton.
“So it seems like it’s starting to gain a little traction,” she said. Going forward, Baby Grace giveaways will be every first Thursday of the month.
The new Warren County Baby Grace organization came about in large part thanks to Elaine Auch, Director of Serve at College United Methodist Church, who has also long been involved with many other local nonprofits and charity efforts.
“I’m involved in prison ministry with the Methodist Church, and so the person that I visit was way up north of Kansas City. And so I would go up and visit him and I met other people in the ministry,” Auch said. Those people included a woman whose church had a Baby Grace chapter. Auch had never heard of the organization.
“So what I did is I got a whole lot of people together in the church bus and we went up to Kansas City and we visited Baby Graces up there to see how they do it,” she said.
“Every church’s Baby Grace is different, but apparently Baby Grace started with a schoolteacher that was helping a pregnant student that couldn’t get diapers and that kind of thing, and it just started rolling.”
College United Methodist Pastor Bill LaMora said Baby Grace grew from one Methodist church in the Kansas City area to around 10 now from mid-Missouri and west.
“There’s none on this side of the state,” he said, “and so we picked up on it and said ‘This is a great idea,’ so we started the first one here, and our hope is that through the years we’ll help other churches expand and do it as we get closer to St. Louis.”
College United Methodist Church also recently held its annual Serve Sunday event on Sept. 13. LaMora estimated 80 to 100 people participated, dividing into groups to assist other organizations and do various work to help those in need.
“The idea is to find places throughout the community that we can just be an extra pair of hands and feet to try to help people out, and so we’re kind of going all over the place,” said LaMora, who started Serve Sunday locally when he became pastor four years ago. He also organized Serve Sunday events at his previous churches.
Some examples of organizations the church volunteers support on Serve Sunday include Anchor House, a housing assistance nonprofit with a focus on homeless veterans, and Turning Point Advocacy Services, a shelter and support organization for survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Other Serve Sunday volunteer efforts included cleaning up after AGAPE’s “Found” pop-up sale, held Sept. 11 and 12 at the MaryLou Community Building in Truesdale. College United Methodist Church has long partnered with AGAPE, a nonprofit whose efforts in its mission to fight hunger and end homelessness in Warren County include operating a food pantry as well as a thrift store to raise money.
Auch is a founding member of AGAPE, which began “30-some-odd years ago from my kitchen table,” she said, when she “just called up a bunch churches and said ‘We’ve got a problem here.’” AGAPE Executive Director Michelle Bernth, who came up with the idea for the “Found” pop-up sale, noted, however, that AGAPE is not specifically a religious organization.
“Agape is a nonprofit organization. We are a secular organization. Everyone is welcome at Agape,” Bernth said. “There’s no reason for anyone to be afraid to come to us if they need services. We serve the entire county, and we’re very happy to serve anybody who comes and needs our assistance.”
AGAPE feeds about 2,000 people a month, Bernth said, noting that the food pantry is a “client-choice” facility. “So it’s set up kind of like a grocery store,” she said. “The families get to come in and they get to shop for their own food, which makes it more dignified.”
Besides food, AGAPE also tries to keep personal care and hygiene items such as shampoo, laundry detergent and toilet paper in stock when possible, which is also the case at the Wright City Community Food Pantry, another resource available to those in need who live in the 63390 zip code or Wright City R-II School District.
Pastor Joe Purl, Wright City Community Food Pantry’s executive director, said the pantry serves between 800 and 1,000 meals per month. It is open Wednesdays from 4 to 6 p.m. and the second and fourth Saturdays of the month from 10 to 11:30 a.m. There is also a drive-through food pantry from 10 to 11 a.m. the fourth Tuesday of each month at the Lions Club, he said.
Many volunteers work both during the food pantry’s regular hours and also at the drive-through pantry, “so there’s a variety of opportunities for volunteers to help out and serve their community,” he said.
Purl is involved with Wright City Community Church of the Nazarene as well as other churches and denominations, he said. The food pantry is not affiliated with any church or organization, though, as it is its own nonprofit with a governing board that oversees it, he said.
The Wright City food pantry, like AGAPE and College United Methodist, works closely with organizations like Anchor House and Turning Point.
Franci Schwartz, board member and past president of AGAPE, said the nonprofit sometimes receives grant money that allows it to assist people with a deposit on an apartment if they are currently homeless. AGAPE can also sometimes help people make utility payments if their water or electricity is in danger of being shut off or already has been.
“We can only help a client once in 12 months, because we just have to stretch it as far as we can,” she said.
AGAPE has also recently launched a mobile food pantry program, bringing a refrigerated van to Jonesburg and Bellflower for distributions once a month.
“Those two towns are actually in Montgomery County, but they’re food deserts,” Schwartz said. “There’s just a small store in each town, and the poverty levels are high, and it’s hard for people to get to a pantry from there sometimes.”
While local nonprofits continue to collaborate to help those in need, Bernth said changes approved last year at the federal level have complicated efforts. Funding cuts to both direct food assistance to low-income people through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and programs that supply food pantries with food have created a “perfect storm” situation for organizations like AGAPE as they attempt to meet growing demand, she said.
For area residents who are struggling and may be seeking to learn what services they are eligible for, Schwartz said the key point of contact for “coordinated entry” is the Community Council of St. Charles County. Besides St. Charles, the Community Council also serves Warren and Lincoln counties.
“In a lot of places in the United States, there’s just the number you can dial, 211,” Schwartz said. “If you call 211 from Warren County you’re going to get St. Louis, and they’re going to give you the number for St. Charles, so we try to get people to just call St. Charles directly, because it saves them a step.”
The Community Council keeps track of all nonprofit services in the area. “That would be the place to go to get directed to the right agency,” Schwartz said.
Close coordination is important, Bernth said, to avoid duplication of services, so that all nonprofits in the area can be the best stewards possible of their resources.
Purl similarly said that collaboration between area nonprofits allows them to pool and distribute resources more effectively. In July, for example, a single donor gave the Wright City pantry 15 pallets of milk, he said.
“And so we were not only able to supply our organization and the people in our area and keep them thriving well, but we were able to partner with 17 other organizations in our region to help supply fresh milk to those in need in our whole region,” he said. “So it’s amazing stuff that’s going on.”
