Surrounded by bus buckets full of carrots, mashed potatoes, turkey and plenty more Thanksgiving dinner fixings, multiple organizations gathered at the Bordentown Elks Lodge on the morning of Nov. 21 to prepare and package 400 meals for residents in need.
Through a joined effort between the Elks, Bordentown Home for Funerals, Bordentown Kiwanis, Christ Church Parish, Consolidated Fire Association and the Knights of Columbus Council 570, multiple people from each community group prepared meals from morning until noon in the spirit of thankfulness and giving back for the holiday season.
“The goal here is to allow people the dignity to have a real Thanksgiving meal and not worry about where their food is going to come from,” said George Veitengruber of Bordentown Kiwanis, who helped coordinate the community food drive. “If they don’t have family, this is a reminder of what family and the holidays are about. Nobody needs to go without food. Nobody needs to without the dignity and that feeling of belonging.”
Although consolidated efforts for holiday food drives throughout Bordentown had been in operation for many years, Veitengruber said there hadn’t been one that directly served the people in the area.
With an initiative idea from Father Matthew Tucker of Christ Church, he and several other leaders from community organizations and local businesses joined together to coordinate the food drive at the Elks, which has now been in operation for the past three years.
“If you give the people of Bordentown a chance to do something good, they will do something great,” Father Tucker said.
With more than 300 pounds of smoked turkey donated by Whole Hog BBQ along with food donations from HOB Tavern and Oliver – a Bistro, community volunteers worked in an assembly line as they carved, scooped and packaged meals. According to Veitengruber, the drive has become a growing effort since it first began, as the group continues to ante up their production each year.
“When you scale up from 50 to 400 meals, you think that sounds crazy, but the efficiency of this system – the assembly line set up for this, makes it so that you just churn these meals out,” said Veitengruber. “We have a great system, and there’s nothing that stops us from growing this more, so the more people we find in need, the more we’re just going to make.”
Inside the Elks’ kitchen carving away at the turkey was another Kiwanis member, Jim Maloney, who said the experience of working in a conjoined effort like this was a more prominent experience than having to work separate from other organizations.
“It’s a real great thing being able to spend time helping those who need it,” said Maloney. “It brings different community groups together into one event where they don’t work with each other enough, so it’s great to have events [like this] where church organizations and community groups work together instead of doing their own thing.”
Once packaged, the meals were delivered to people such as families in need throughout the local school district, service members on duty for the holiday at the county’s McGuire Air Force Base and homebound senior citizens not only in Bordentown, but throughout the state as well.
As Veitengruber took an occasional moment to walk around the facility to check up on the production to find out what each person needed whether it’d be more turkey or potatoes, he said the team of people working together in the room was symbolic of the Bordentown people.
“Bordentown is a great community, and these are the people in the community that have the ability to help out to make sure those that feel weak and powerless, [will now feel] back to human,” said Veitengruber. “This town is very cognoscente of giving back to each other and helping where we can, so each meal is just a small symbol of being able to keep that promise.”
