MANCHESTER – It was kind of like a movie, where a problem was going to derail an entire holiday and people had to pull together to help.
In this case, it was that Thanksgiving food donations were supposed to be brought to The Barn on Route 70 in Whiting where it was then going to be picked up by residents for the holiday. However, The Barn’s truck broke down on the morning before Thanksgiving. This caused a bunch of people to scramble together to make sure the food gets there in time.
The food was still at Community Medical Center in Toms River, so Manchester Mayor Robert Arace and members of his staff – Judy Noonan and Frank Nicolato – brought their cars and joined the people who were picking up the large and heavy boxes of food and delivering them.
“We’ve been doing meals at The Barn for six years, every Wednesday,” Tom Yanisko, the administrative director of hospitality services said. “We help with congregant meals as well. We collect money from the food drive we do every year and we use it to help fund these kinds of events.”
Mayor Robert Arace loads boxes of food into a truck that will be transporting them to The Barn in Whiting which is a pickup area for residents to receive the food in time for Thanksgiving. (Photo by Bob Vosseller)
“This is from the hospital and employees, physicians and some of our vendors,” he said. “We also use some of that money to fund the Brick Vocational school culinary program and do a couple thousand meals for people in Ocean County. We supply them with those food products from our program.”
Yanisko said, “last night was a long tough night but we had a lot of great volunteers within the hospital that helped us. Our employees are very committed to supporting our food drive for over 17 years and we have collected more than 330,000 pounds over that time.”
“One of our goals is fighting food insecurity in our general region. We have a lot of seniors, veterans, and children so we try to do what we can, target those different groups in the community to be proactive and pay it forward,” Yanisko said.
The hospital volunteers work with The Barn which provides a setting for seniors each Wednesday in conjunction with a county program that includes senior activities for them.
Volunteers from an area financial institution hold up the blue bags filled with food items that will reach Manchester Township residents in time to prepare a Thanksgiving meal. (Photo courtesy Manchester Township)
Once Noonan, the mayor’s liaison to the township’s senior services office, had loaded up her vehicle with large boxes of food she was off to The Barn and later distributed 73 bags of food from the donations collected at various senior developments in Whiting.
Mayor Arace said he and his staff didn’t mind stepping up to do some of the leg work of unloading and transporting the food to its Whiting destination and that it was wonderful that 1,700 meals were being provided to members of the Manchester community that would provide a Thanksgiving meal.
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