The food drive barrels in the front hall of St. Peter’s Catholic School, 815 E. Meyer Boulevard, are brimming with donations in honor of “National Catholic Schools Week.”
Student Brynlee Smith is part of a group of six students lifting bags of groceries into a grocery cart bound for the parish’s food pantry located in the social services building on the Brookside campus. Each grade level is assigned a different pantry staple.
Brynlee was eager to donate to the student food drive “because it feels like I have too much and I want to give some of that away, and I never really have a chance to do that, so when I do get a chance, it feels really good,” she says.
“Food is love,” says Anne Sly, a retired physician and a regular volunteer at the food pantry. “There is something that is so concrete in ‘I take this from my home and envision someone eating this for dinner’ that is really rewarding and doesn’t occur when you just give money.”
St. Peter’s has a long tradition of working on hunger issues including a community garden that grows fresh produce and a family-friendly bike-a-thon/food drive/treasure hunt known as Cranksgiving that’s netted thousands in pounds of food and cash donations.
Throughout the year, even the youngest students are able to get in on the act by adding artwork to paper grocery sacks and writing letters tucked in with the food items. The older students can engage through various Girl Scouts projects or membership in the school’s social services club.
“We have been here for over 100 years — from the farm fields to a thriving community to the urban problems plaguing Kansas City,” says Mark Hague, the church’s director of social services. “We have a lot of people in our neighborhood who need help. Part of the (government social service) system is set up to help people, but there’s a huge undercurrent of we also don’t want anyone scamming the system…but 99.9% of people are just trying to scrape by.”
One regular recipient is a grandmother on disability benefits who is caring for her grandchildren. Another woman has difficulties filling out her SNAP forms. When an unhoused neighbor rides up, he’s loaded up with pop-top soups and other easy-open, no cook food items.
St. Peter’s became a Harvesters member agency in 2022 to supplement their non-perishable goods with items such as meat and dairy. In the first year, they served 350 households. That number grew to more than 500 in 2024.
Meanwhile, Sly has decided to create recipe sheets with color photos for easy-to-prepare meal ideas in hopes of relieving the stress for recipients.
“What I love about parish life is how you connect to the community,” Sly says. “We try to understand the complexities of the people we’re trying to help.”
