Ten Year Celebration
On October 28, 2020 the team gathered at St. Anne's garden to celebrate 10 year's of serving the community.
The meeting started with an opening prayer. Karen Randle addressed the team with the highlights as follows:
Over $21,000 has been received during COVID (March - October 2020). This is well above the normal rate
Expenses for the year to date $15,277.
Number of persons served per month is around 1,000.
In Kind Donations include the following:
A cow donated by a church member that resulted in 500 pounds of hamburger in 1 lb packages
1530 prepackaged boxes to date from Lions Club, Contra Costa Food Bank, St. Vincent de Paul. Lions is sourcing the boxes from SEWA, a Hindu faith humanitarian organization.
A brand new freezer from the local Lions Club. It easily doubled our freezer capacity and was very timely to store the 500 lbs of hamburger.
White Pony Express is being considered as a new food source for us. They provide prepackaged produce and dry goods that can be dropped at our sites the day of distribution.
Father Ron Schmidt conducted the closing prayer.
The team then enjoyed a catered Mexican food luncheon.
"Let us not become weary in doing good, for the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." - Galatians 6:9
Justin & Mary Carlino
At this time we would also like to celebrate the ten year anniversary of dedicated service by Justin & Mary Carlino to the Delta Christian Community Food Pantry. They have made the decision to retire from service. They were involved from the beginning and we will miss them.
The Carlino's are residents of Discovery Bay having moved there 11 years ago. They grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. and were high school sweethearts. This Jan. 2021 will mark their 71st wedding anniversary. Truly amazing!
In 2005, at the age of 73, Justin was in need of a new heart. He was a candidate for a heart transplant but the cut off age at the time was 70. Stanford hospital decided move forward provide the heart transplant to Justin. He quickly proved them right by recovering and leaving the hospital after 4 days. The average stay is much longer and a quicker recovery has never been done before or since. He is a medical marvel and Stanford keeps their tabs on him by having as a participant in 5 studies.
Justin in realizing that he had the new heart of a 22 yr old female wanted to keep the heart muscle in shape. He made the decision to take up competitive walking. The training for each half marathon race was 250 miles.In his first competitive race Justin set the course record for 80 year olds. Before he was done, he competed on over 6 races.
