Yorktown Officials Urge Donations to Food Pantries

04/17/20 - Yorktown officials visited the food pantry at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Mohegan Lake today to donate food and to remind the public that some of their neighbors need help.

The Community Food Pantry at St. Mary's Mohegan Lake at 1836 E. Main St. typically serves 90 to 110 families a week on Saturday mornings. Recent holidays, combined with job and income losses caused by lock-down efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus, have elevated the demand for food at the pantry. On Easter weekend the pantry served 199 families and the weekend before that about 130 families visited the pantry, which is only doing drive-through service in observance of social distancing.

“The numbers have definitely been ticking up,” said Cynthia Secor-Smith, one of the food pantry’s board members. “We’re getting new people. Some of the other food pantries have closed and they are directing their families to us.”

The Food Pantry at St. Mary’s Mohegan Lake is an interfaith community-based, not-for-profit service organization staffed by volunteers. Its mission is to provide supplemental food to families or individuals who live in the Mohegan Lake and greater Yorktown – Cortlandt area. The St. Mary’s pantry has not been forced to close because it is using a skeleton crew that has remained healthy by practicing social distancing and other contagion-avoidance measures.

Cash donations can be made at the food pantry’s website. Food donations can be made Monday through Friday before 5:30 p.m. To avoid person-to-person contact, the food donations should be left in a box next to the double doors on a wooden deck at the church; the box is checked hourly during the day for donations.

Yorktown officials dropped off their donations this morning during the Friday food packing session in preparation for Saturday’s distribution.

“Almost all of us are sheltering in our homes and we are not witnessing the difficulties that some of our neighbors face. This need is real and we should all pitch in to help, even if it’s a modest donation,” said Yorktown Supervisor Matt Slater, who donated a bag of groceries.

“I’m grateful to St. Mary’s and the food pantry volunteers for their work. In this time of crisis we all have to care for one another,” said Yorktown Town Councilman Tom Diana, who also donated groceries.