Meals by Grace

Thanks Whitlow Elementary School

suellen — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:48:49 +0000

Thank-you Parents, Children, and PTA Officers and Volunteers! I just returned from picking up a TRUCK LOAD of food for our Summer Bags Of Love. Because of this gift more children will receive food this summer!

We will sort and package this food into bags and deliver it every week of the summer to Children that are hungry. Thank – you Whitlow Elementary School for inspiring us to get involved and refuse to tolerate hungry children in our community.

Weekend of overwhelming abundance :-)

suellen — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:11:18 +0000

Huge hugs go out to so many wonderful persons for their loving kindness over the weekend. It started with Lanier United Methodist Church who invited us to come and speak on Saturday morning – such a warm, inviting group who asked very insightful questions. They had also collected for us a car load full (I’m talking every nook and cranny) of items for our Summer Kid’s Bags of Love — such a blessing!!! THANK YOU!!!! We’re praying they will decide to come volunteer with us on a regular basis to help us be Jesus’ hands and feet to our community.
Then a precious group of 4 year olds, “Happy Helpers” came on the scene – Grace Chapel’s little ones, lead by Ms. Liz came shyly into the kitchen carrying bags almost as big as they were. They were full of excitement, with eyes shining with hope that their gift would be accepted and counted “worthy” – HUGS ALL ‘ROUND, soon set them at ease to chatter and share. Our hearts were especially touch to learn that one sweet little boy (recently adopted from the Ukraine with his 2 brothers) had a particular need to see his gift go to help hungry children, because you see, he (at only 4 years old) still has a strong memory of how it felt to be hungry, and “no one brought them a bag of food” – my throat closes at this point, and the tears begin to pour. Hunger (or food insecurity) is a universal problem, and while I can’t solve it in the Ukraine, I can feed the little ones here, in my neighborhood, and pray that one day one will grow up, go to the Ukraine, and solve it there….
Special thanks also go to our dear, dear friends who, though tired from a long, busy weekend themselves took the time to love, encourage, counsel, and advise us with the lessons they’ve learned in their years of ministry. May God bless you with the desire of your hearts….and may He grant us decades more together!!!!

Got group?

suellen — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:32:35 +0000

So many things “wind up” or “wind down” this time of year… Spring winds down, and Summer winds up, the school year winds down and for most, vacation plans wind up. Many church Life Groups and civic organizations wind down their year in May and take a hiatus during the summer.
For organizations like Meals by Grace this time of year is not a wind down but a wind up – our needs go WAY UP – as the school year winds down families are faced with feeding their children all the time versus having the schools handle two meals per day. Also, those heavy donations to food banks and food pantries that come every year with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are now a distant memory (as are the volunteers who flooded in to help).
Please, as you plan your next few months, won’t you see if you can plan just ONE Sunday a month for your group to come and help those in need by preparing a meal and delivering it to them? If your group has lots of younger children, sign up for one of our “first Saturday” sessions when we focus on teaching the younger ones what it means to share with those in need. If your group is mainly adults or high schoolers then by all means come any Sunday (2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th- if there is one) and help then. It takes close to 40+ volunteers to fully staff the five teams who work from 1-4 pm to accomplish the task.
Team one works in the kitchen with our chef to prepare the actual meal, team two works chopping fruit or preparing a salad if items have been donated to allow that. Team three works in the pantry, assuring we have the canned food “Family Meal bags of love” ready for distribution, and creating the next week’s “Kid’s Summer Bags of Love” to cover their breakfasts and lunches. Then there’s team four, volunteers who work to divide all the breads that have been donated, and to evenly distribute the desserts we have been given -and last, but special to our hearts, team five who clean up and do dishes as we go (and if chef Ben is in charge of the kitchen there can be LOTS of dishes to wash! Love you Ben!
Then just as all that activity winds down the planning and distribution of families for delivery winds up – we need a minimum of 10 drivers a week to be able to deliver all the week’s blessings to all our program families. It doesn’t take much time, but it does take loving, willing hearts and hands – won’t you please contact your group, let’s have a Summer HUMP of volunteers, not a Summer slump. We promise you’ll have fun and love the experience!!! Three hours of your time once a month (such a small sacrifice) could ensure over 150 people will have a hot meal and food for their week!! We need YOU!

SATURDAY, May 11th, MbG NEEDS YOU!!!

suellen — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:31:50 +0000

This coming Saturday is going to be a marathon of activities we need lots of help accomplishing! First our day begins with meal prep and delivery to our precious families from 1-4pm at 6755 Major’s Road, Cumming 30040. You can now sign up through the web-site here, no need to sign up anywhere else, and our site will take sign-ups even up until the last second, no cutoff!

A big part of this week’s work will be PINEAPPLE!!! We are blessed to be the recipient of TONS of pineapple from Edible Arrangement’s Mother’s Day Bouquet abundance. This pineapple comes to us by the tub-full and will need to be trimmed and chopped. It will take several people a few hours to do this (nibbling is recommended ) – come, be a part of our BIG PINEAPPLE PARTY!!!

When the meal is ready, we will take names for volunteers to deliver to our families – while the pineapple chopping continues if necessary, and then as deliver-ers return we will break for energy snacks (okay, cake really ) and wait (if necessary) for the canned goods to begin arriving. Come for any part you can, we’ll take all the help you can muster!

Around 3pm the trucks will head out to the USPS annex on Hwy 9 to begin loading the blessings from this week’s Postal Carrier canned food drive. As soon as they have the trucks loaded they will come back to Grace Chapel (see address above) and we will need a team on hand to unload the trucks.

In addition, we will need a team set up inside with tables to quickly sort the donations as they come in into “like things together” like all the green beans go here, and all the spaghetti sauce goes there We’ll work at that until everything has arrived and been sorted then the final step will be storage.

We’ll separate out the ingredient items we can use in cooking our hot meals and store them in our “ingredient pantry”. We’ll take the items we can use to create our Kid’s Summer Bags of Love and put them aside for creating more bags. We’ll take items we can use to create our Family Meal Bags of Love and put them in our Family Pantry and everything else, the overage of abundance will be crated and taken to our off-site storage.

Pick your challenge and come join us for a day of fun and progress as we work to ‘lay by’ enough supplies to last us all year!!!

PS – we have ordered the items available for our Kid’s Summer Bags of Love from the Food Bank, to be delivered in the next week or so, but so far have not received a donation to pay for them…. $200 will cover enough fruit cups and jelly (for the PB&J sandwiches) to do ALL our bags for the rest of the summer. Won’t you sacrifice a little so Forsyth County’s children in need can be blessed?

Summer Bags of Love needs

suellen — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:32:43 +0000

In just 4 weeks 8589 children in Forsyth County will be out of school, and out of food. That’s right, those kids, whose parents depend on the school system to feed them twice per day will be home with no additional resources…. well except for those few Meals by Grace program children. We are in the process of creating Summer Kid’s bags of love to be delivered to the children on our program once a week for every week of summer. There’s a full bag list of what we need posted in a downloadable format right here on the web-site. But, for example for the 300 bags, we’ll need 300 jars of jam and 3000 (yes, thousand since they are individual size) fruit cups. That’s a whole lot of money…. well maybe not… remember we’re food bank partners. THis week we can order 12oz bottles of grape and strawberry jam, and little 4 oz cups of peaches and mixed fruit. To get the quantities above mentioned – we need just $200. Will someone provide? Can a group of you, or maybe a company provide? Just $200 and we can cross the jam AND the fruit off the list of needed items!!! Please, one little click of a button… please donate!

IT’S HERE! IT’S HERE! IT’S HERE!!!

suellen — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 12:36:03 +0000

The long awaited NEW WEBSITE is HERE!!! It’s better than Christmas around here this morning!!! Andrew, it is BEAUTIFUL and we will be forever indebted to you for your precious gift to Meals by Grace!!! Dr. Oz was equally as blessed to have you work on his site… I would recommend you to anyone! PS- we love Ellie and her photography that she did for us as well – such a gifted family!!
So, who will be first to try out the new site? We need so many things to be able to make our Kid’s Bags of Love for covering their summer food needs. The list is here on the site, click on WAYS TO HELP in the pink header, select MEAL NEEDS LIST, and scroll down to see the Summer Kid’s Bags of Love needs… PS – we can purchase some items needed from the Food Bank (if we have funds available) for 16 cents a pound, but we need the funds, so please open your heart to the need (8589 hungry children now in Forsyth County, versus the 7516 of just a year or so ago), multiply out the families size and you’ll see our goal of feeding just 80 children is quite modest, but dream of the funding to feed ALL of them!! Click the Donate button on the right side and let me know if it works…. thanks to everyone for your support and help as we work in community to solve this hunger issue together!!!

What a partnership! Not just Good, but Great!

suellen — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:45:20 +0000

You know those moments that happen, that take your breath away, those moments when you see the greatness of God reflected in another’s face or actions? And it humbles you. Completely. I’m talking ‘face to the floor’ awe of a God so great that you are overcome with it….

Yesterday I posted about the kids and how difficult next week will be for so many families, and I asked if, please, someone would click the donate button and help us cover a portion of the cost of buying the items we need to fill the children’s bags of love we deliver to them to help them with Breakfast, Lunch and Snacks for all of next week. We had found a couple of items we could afford through the food bank, but not nearly enough so I reached out and asked for help…

God is so “good” – I can’t help but believe it was His delightful sense of humor that send us a donor with the last name of Good!!! How wonderful – I don’t have her permission to share more, but my dear tender-hearted, generous friend thank you so much, so very, very much for helping us with this. I hope you will come volunteer to help us fill the very bags you have so lovingly provided assistance with so I can hug you and thank you in person. But no matter what, know how deeply we and all the children appreciate your gift. THANK YOU!!!

Would you also be able to share in this need? One thing we hardly every have to share is MILK – we tried buying quarts of the shelf stable milk so we could keep it on hand to share, but it is so horribly expensive. From Walmart it is over $3 EACH per QUART – we can get a whole gallon of refrigerated milk for that! And, truthfully, the families need a gallon more than a quart. We will be sending home to the children cereal for next week, but we have no milk for them, and the food bank didn’t either. Is there anyone out there with connections with a grocery store, or food business that could get us a donation of 30 gallons of milk for our families so the kids can have milk next week? Or a donation of funds so we could go buy some? Father, all resources in Heaven and on Earth are yours… please “reallocate” some of them to this need. Amen (so be it) “and where one or more ask together in My name, it will be done” – we are asking…

QUICK! We need someone to make a donation for our Kid’s Bags of Love

suellen — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:32:45 +0000

I’m so excited (I seem to say that a lot anymore, don’t I?) But God is so good! As most of you know, next week is Spring Break. And for many of you that means the first of a couple of weeks to the beach between now and next fall, but for the kids in the MbG program it just means one very long, very hungry week. There will be no free breakfasts or lunches next week, and their families won’t have any extra money to buy food for them just because they’re home when they are not usually…

We will be packing Kid’s Bags of Love this coming Saturday for immediate delivery to our kids so they WILL have food next week. The list of items we need includes 5 breakfast food, 5 lunches, and 5 healthy snacks to get each child through the week. Now to go buy these items for 80 children would be VERY expensive, but, because we are partners with the food bank we can shop from their available foods list. We have an opportunity to purchase some of the needed items, like graham crackers, and cheese sticks THIS WEEK. But we need some loving generous person to click the DONATE button in the upper right area of this page, or contact us to help us get them. We don’t know the total cost, because these items will be included in our regular order request of meat, dairy, and bread for our families, but I promise you if we can get a donation for our Kid’s Bags of Love we will direct all of it towards the purchase of their food for the bags (PS-it’s only 8 weeks until summer… we will need 800 bags to get our kids through the 8+ weeks of summer).

Please won’t you donate? Did you know just $100 will cover most of the cost, not counting the milk for their cereal? For example we can order cheese sticks this week, enough to cover all of their bags during Spring Break and a bit longer for like, $5 — yes, just five dollars… Won’t you please help us? The need is so great….

To download a complete list of items we need please go to the tab for the Needs Lists.

EVER WONDER WHAT CAN BE BOUGHT WITH A GA EBT CARD?

suellen — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:48:36 +0000

Look at the list below and compare it to your shopping list are there some important items missing? What do you notice?

GEORGIA EBT FOOD LIST – BUY FOOD WITH GA EBT CARD

Below is a list of foods you can buy with your Georgia EBT Card. SNAP provides a general food list that you can purchase with your Electronic Benefits Transfer debit card in Georgia

Eligible Foods You Can Buy With A EBT Card in Georgia

- Fruits and vegetables

- Dairy products

- Cereals & Breads

- Plants or seeds that produce food to eat

- Meats, poultry and fish

Non Eligible EBT Benefits Household Food items

- Beer, wine, liquor

- Food that will be eaten in the store

- Cigarettes or tobacco

- Hot foods

- Vitamins and medicines

- Non foods like:

- Soaps and paper products

- Pet foods

- Household supplies

Additional Georgia EBT Food List

- Energy drinks that have a nutrition facts label are eligible foods

- Soft drinks, candy, cookies, snack crackers, ice cream are food items and are eligible items

- Seafood, steak, and bakery cakes are also food items and are therefore eligible items

- Live animals may not be purchased with SNAP benefits

- Energy drinks with supplement label are classified by the FDA as supplements are not eligible

Thank-you 2013 Annual Women’s Retreat !

suellen — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:41:00 +0000

What a surprise blessing to receive the donation from the Christ the King Lutheran Church 2013 Annual Women’s Retreat. These wonderful ladies collected a offering for Meals by Grace in the amount $168.00! That represents over 1,000 lbs. of food for hungry children in our community. Thank-you for your loving gift!

Together we can make a difference in our community.

Suellen and Steve Daniels