MIDDLEBORO – For Sacred Heart Food Pantry volunteers, friendly conversations with clients are one tactic volunteers use to combat the stigma of going to a food pantry.

“It’s our chance to connect with the person and humanize the process,” said Food Pantry Director David Cunningham.

Volunteers of the Sacred Heart Food Pantry spent Tuesday, Nov. 21 donating turkeys and other Thanksgiving staples to families in need. 

For volunteer Alan Amaral, said that giving families the opportunity to host a turkey dinner was about more than just stopping hunger.

“There’s a lot of people who have fractured families,” Amaral explained. “To be able to come together to have a meal for Thanksgiving, it brings people back together. A lot of hearts get mended.”

Cunningham said that the food pantry gave out approximately 490 Thanksgiving meals before the holiday.

The pantry is run by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul Conference of Middleboro, which is a Catholic organization that serves the towns of Middleboro, Lakeville, Rochester, and Carver.

Some of the meals were distributed to veterans in Middleboro and nearby towns. Other meals went to food pantry clients.

One 53 year old woman waiting outside the pantry for a Thanksgiving meal said that affording food is difficult because the “cost of living went up and people still make minimum wage.” She added she gets food from the pantry “maybe once every couple of months” and she limits her visits to when she needs the services.

“If I don’t need to, I don’t come,” she said.

The food pantry’s normal hours of operations are on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The food pantry operates like a regular grocery store, clients can browse shelfs and select items that they need. 

To help clients feel respected, they are greeted by a volunteer, who then accompanies the clients as they shop for food and engages them in a friendly conversation. Cunningham said that the conversations between clients and volunteers help people feel more comfortable at the pantry.

“I think it makes it like normal everyday life. If you go to the grocery store you’re going to bump into people you know and talk to them,” Cunningham explained. 

Clients can sometimes feel “ashamed by having to come in and get a handout,” he added. The conversations are a way to help reduce the stigma.

“Once you start establishing a human connection I think all those barriers break down,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham said the demand for the pantry’s services has increased since the pandemic.

“Just this past Saturday alone we had 53 families come through the pantry,” he said. “Through the pandemic we might have been averaging about 20-25 families per pantry session.”

Cunningham said one benefit of getting food from the pantry is that it can help families free up the budget for other necessary expenses.

“We try to let [families] know they could make their electric bill every month if they didn’t have to spend all that money on groceries, and they can get a large amount of their groceries by coming here,” Cunningham said.

Amaral said that he related to the clients who visited the pantry.

“They’re all like us. Anyone is a paycheck away from a lot of trouble.”