The Eldred Township supervisors asked Karena Thek, the director of the West End Food Pantry in Eldred Township, to give a report about everything the food bank has done in 2023.

“You’ll tend to note that at the West End Food Pantry, we try our hardest to stay humble. We try to stay out of the spotlight. We try to do good deeds every day of every year with a group of - you will not believe this - but this year we had 1,106 individual volunteers sign our sign-in sheet,” Thek said.

Other stats include:

• 2,682 unique families - many are older adults;

• Moved more than 1 million pounds of food, and;

• Average poundage per month was 89,000 pounds.

• The value of the food distributed by the center is worth $170,880 per month based on the government average of $1.92 per pound. The total for this year is $2,050,560.

“Most of that food would have gone to landfills,” she said. “It’s the weird flavors. It’s the damaged pallets. It’s the expired pallets. It’s the government meat. It’s the stuff that might not be optimal. If people could go out and buy fillet mignon I’m sure they certainly would. But you know what, it fills bellies all over the place here in this county.”

• 8,736 families came to the center this year. That’s 23,460 people: 506 infants and babies; 3,396 children; 1,614 teens; 10,380 adults; 7,564 seniors.

“They come to us more regularly than any of these other age groups, which is heartbreaking,” Thek said about the older adults.

In addition to food, the food pantry covered the installation of a new furnace for somebody who was financially destitute. They have also covered the cost of heating fuel, utility bills, mortgage, fixed a hot water heater and broken pipes, paid for a burial, a memorial service, birthday cakes for children 12 and under, Thanksgiving and Christmas meals, book bags filled with food, emergency bags for hikers on the Appalachian Trail, and more.

“It’s amazing what we can do with so little. It just takes the time to hear and then step up and do,” she said.