SAGINAW, MI — New Beginnings Ministries Outreach, 701 Hess in the city’s south end, is home to the Mi Casa Su Casa food and clothing distribution site.
Hidden Harvest has provided major support with grocery and restaurant surplus items, along with operating guidance, which demonstrates that the innovative agency supports numerous smaller sites beyond the adjacent East Side Soup Kitchen at the Hunger Solutions Center, 940 East Genesee near Janes.
With Hidden Harvest expansion into Bay and Midland counties under Samantha McKenzie, director and CEO, the ever-growing count has surpassed 175 for truck deliveries to grassroots operations like pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, youth after-school programs and senior sites.
To view the full list, visit hiddenharvestshares.org.
Mi Casa Su Casa, “my home (is) your home,” kicked off in 2021 as a response to COVID-19. The Rev. Augustine Delgado, New Beginnings pastor, and Claudia, his spouse, took note of major hardship during the pandemic’s peak. They witnessed the poverty both through the church and through his employment as a state DSS specialist assigned to Jessie Rouse Elementary, while she oversees the outreach during his hours at the nearby school.
Signs of struggles were as simple as neighborhood children walking and playing without winter coats.
Claudia’s first call was to McKenzie at Hidden Harvest, and soon a multi-age, multi-racial group of neighbors began arriving at 3 p.m. on Tuesdays, some on foot, others in aging cars and trucks. Some lend helping hands to pass out the mix of kitchen staples, with various goodies also on the tables. After all, people in need also can enjoy a snack now and then.
And if anyone could use a jacket or a pair of jeans, some shoes or a sweater, those also are on hand. Plus there are school supplies for the kids, donated separately aside from Hidden Harvest, of course.
This all adds up to faith in action, regardless of whether Casa patrons actually join the New Beginnings congregation, Claudia notes.
Their location since 2015 was a Roaring ’20s-era fraternal lodge hall, and the basement is where the partying took place, with the kitchen taking up a lion’s share of the floor and a small corner cordoned for performers. Now the old rooms, beneath the modern updated church sanctuary, serve an outreach purpose that old-time lodge members may not have imagined.
Advice and footstuffs
Even before she took action to oversee a site, Claudia was volunteering at the Hunger Solutions Center on the city’s north end near downtown, where she first encountered Sam McKenzie
The Hidden Harvest leader follows an adage that “food is so much more than food.”
She elaborates: “It’s traditions … time spent together … a feeling of security … and it’s nutrition.”
Speaking of staples and sweets, especially at holiday time, Samantha offers the story of a grandmother who was lunching at the soup kitchen and learned that baking supplies, re-packaged by Hidden Harvest volunteers, were available from a pair of regional donors, Star of the West Milling and Michigan Sugar. The little ones were visiting her home for the weekend, and now they could make cookies together.
Ideas for contributions
Should we donate directly to Hidden Harvest or to a program closer to our homes? Fifty-fifty for both? Cash always brings gratitude, of course, but the smaller sites generally look for the canned goods and the nonperishables, while a larger operation is able to leverage every dollar into much larger value via bulk purchases.
Hidden Harvest started 30 years ago, with the Community Foundation’s leadership, to collect and distribute foods that were being thrown away, from corporate canned goods to local bakeries to participating restaurants. These are combined with donations from kindhearted family farmers in the local region, with one sample being the piles of take-what-you-wish sweet corn in summer.
The original cramped headquarters was the former downtown Sunoco station until 2005 construction of the Hunger Center provided expanded new homes for both Hidden Harvest and East Side Soup Kitchen, which had located in various church basements through the years.
Regardless of official poverty statistics since the millennium, both programs are drawing patrons counts that have multiplied many times over, and now the structure that was built to accommodate their prior lack of space no longer is big enough. Expansion will close Thompson street at the rear if plans move forward. Major support blends private contributions, a state grant and federal ARPA funds.
However, those monies would be for the building, separate from program operations, which is why holiday donations — cold cash or canned corn, along with simple volunteer time — always are welcome.
