Silver Key’s Cupboards Are Bare

Silver Key Senior Services, an organization that helps seniors, needs help to help others. Silver Key’s Food Pantry program is in dire straits for donations. It’s not the Meals On Wheels program that most of us traditionally think about when it comes to Silver Key. However, this Food Pantry is equally as important to those who rely on it to stretch their food budgets.

Silver Key’s Lorri Orwig showed me around the Pantry that should have non-perishables stacked up to the ceiling. Orwig said, “We’ve never seen it this low before and we’ve never had to turn away clients who need emergency food needs in the past, until last week.” Orwig told me that March and April food donations were significantly low. It takes 2200 pounds of food to help the 700 people who are utilizing the Pantry.

500 of those 700 get help from the Commodity Supplemental Food Program with boxes of food that are picked up at Silver Key. Each would get a pantry bag filled with extras. 100 others are part of the Pantry program. Each, comes in once a month and get two bags of groceries. The pantry bags also go home with them to supplement and stretch their food dollars. More than one hundred others are part of a group that comes into Silver Key for emergency food. If there is no food in the Pantry program, their choices are slim to none with other agencies to get food.

Orwig said of that emergency food group, “We’ve only had four people we had to turn away for assistance, but those people had not other food options so we had to give them a list to see if they could seek food assistance. We hope they were able to go and get the food they needed, but we don’t know for sure.” Ultimately according to Orwig, “It broke our hearts for everybody in the building for us not to provide a service that people come to us and know us for. It was almost like were falling down on the job.”

In the past few days, Silver Key got a five thousand pound donation of food. That donation is appreciated, however it will last only until August. Here is a donation drive location to help stock the Silver Key Pantry:

Event: Food Drive for Silver KeyWhen: June 11 – July 9, 2012Location: The Michael Garman Museum & Gallery 2418 W. Colorado Ave. Colorado Springs, CO 80904