Our “Blessing Food Bags” @ Saint Miriam is an award winning outreach to the homeless and food insecure in our area. Our program extends primarily to greater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and suburbs, as well as Camden, New Jersey, Wilmington and Dover, Delaware areas. Our food blessing bags are supported by grant donations and volunteer contributions and are filled with nutritious food and goodies, as well as personal care items and feminine hygiene products for female clients. We introduced these Blessing Food Bags in 2018 and the idea of having a ready bag prepared and ready to hand out to our homeless brothers and sisters was greeted with enthusiasm by the members of our parish. These bags provide a homeless person with enough food to sustain them for a few days, as well as personal care items, and allows us to help them. The bags also contains such items as granola bars, Vienna Sausages, Tuna and/or Chicken packages, water, juice, crackers, peanut butter, and cookies and personal care items, as well as a personal notes and hand-drawn messages from our children programming and those who packed the bags for distribution!
One of the most wonderful aspects of our program is that we ask those who volunteer to take the Blessing Food Bags into the streets to also engage with the receiving individual and bring their humanity to the surface. We invite them to accept the bags, not mandate, and try to visit with them and learn their journey as we support them in their life.
And, we have three additional tag-along bags for special needs and circumstances including females in need of feminine hygiene products and our “Pets with People Bags” for currently homeless persons with pets to care for, and for our transgender brothers and sisters, too!
You can support our outreach program through:
- Financial Gifts
- Volunteer Activities
- Drop off of needed items (daylight hours, near our handicap entrance at the parish, in the marked outdoor receptacle container.)