YMCA Clay County Youth Food Delivery Program

We are the Clay County Youth Food Delivery Program. This is our picture and logo. This is a picture of the thank you card we received from a child in 2017 after we sent food home on the weekend for the child. No child should "werry" about their next meal. We are a community working together to do all we can to ensure kids don't "werry" on school breaks We deliver food to the children in Clay County for weekends, daily during summer breaks and we deliver 2 weeks of shelf-stable food for Christmas Delivery thanks to Duke Energy and our community to helps fill the need left for volunteers and financial donations. We are a community working together and doing the impossible.

Demand grows for youth food delivery program

Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2018, at 9:10 AM

Here we go Clay County. This is from Terry. You hear from me a great deal. Especially when we roll into every new Program. The School Program, the Summer Program (yikes) and most certainly Christmas Delivery as we make it work and figure it out together.

We have delivered two weeks of shelf-stable food to the kids for the past two Christmas Deliveries. This is year three thanks to our kick start from Duke Energy every year who made Christmas Delivery possible since the beginning. If you followed along with us the past two years, you would know that in past two years I would be posting, emailing, and expressing our concern and our worry and a bit of fear about the number of kids we will deliver to at Christmas and the cost.

Last year we had enough money and donations to cover about 250 children. Then, the last week before Christmas Delivery we jumped from 250 something kiddos to 581. We were in a panic. If you don’t know what happened next, we do. Our community donated funds and volunteered to help and we got the job done. It was amazing.

So, if this message was being written last Christmas, it would be a message about worry, a great deal of stress, and a great deal of hope.

This Christmas Delivery post is not being written with worry or stress. It is being written with hope and a belief in our community. It is being written with faith.

We now have 914 kiddos (332 families) to deliver to on December 20, 2018. Yikes! At any other point in time in our Program I would be writing a post in desperation. This year is different. As our Program has grown, so has my faith. I believe. I believe in our community who finds hungry kids an unacceptable symptom of all that is wrong in our community and chooses to help meet the immediate need. So, as I thank you from our kids, I thank you for being the change in our community and helping us feed the kids. Thank you for helping my faith grow and show me my faith was not misplaced.

To summarize? We have $15,000 from Duke Energy. We have already ordered $25,000 worth of food with more to be ordered. We have 60 volunteers to deliver to 332 families as of today (the number will grow). Yet I am calm this evening. I know everyone who can help will help. Everyone who can donate will donate. I know we will get the job done.

Thank you, Clay County, for feeding our kids. One a personal note? Thank you, Clay County. I now “don’t worry (werry).” I simply share with you and believe and everyone giving what they can keeps getting the job done.

Let us know if you can help deliver on the 20th and haven’t already.

I believe.
Terry