Shir Ami in Newtown worked on expanding its longstanding partnership with the Philadelphia nonprofit Caring for Friends over the High Holidays to reach more local families dealing with food insecurity.
The two organizations have worked together for around 15 years, but they boosted the collaboration on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, when every family left services with a brown paper bag, instructions and five tins from Caring for Friends.
Shir Ami’s Executive Director Brent Osborne said that the challenge for every family was to fill up the tins with leftovers from their homes and holiday meals that could be donated to families in need.
“Our partnership with Caring for Friends allows us to connect moments of reflection during the High Holy Days with real, tangible acts of compassion. When our members bring food from their own kitchens to share with strangers, it is a beautiful reminder that repairing the world begins with each of us,” Osborne said.
Osborne said the partnership has picked up since the pandemic, and the food donations have become somewhat ingrained in the synagogue’s programming.
“We have a ton of small groups who work and sort of get together as a social event, and they cook off-site at their homes, and then they bring the meals back to Shir Ami,” Osborne said. “When we have a communitywide dinner or some special event where there’s leftover food, just organically, you see folks think, ‘There’s leftovers. Let’s get people to come into the kitchen and pack it for the freezer.’”
Osborne said the synagogue has obtained a freezer specifically for Caring for Friends donations. The freezer has a tracker where people can mark their donations, and a group of volunteers takes the donations to Caring for Friends periodically.
Combatting food insecurity is a major commitment at Shir Ami, and Osborne said the synagogue has a food bank on site that processes around 30,000 pounds of food each year.
He added that, this year during the holidays, the synagogue collected and distributed around 21,000 pounds to local agencies.
“It’s not a hard ask, and it makes people feel like they’re doing something wonderful,” Osborne said. “It’s also extended into our religious school curriculum. We have our religious school students spend time once a month as part of their class time where they’ll go into the kitchen and pack meals for Caring for Friends.”
Marti Berk, the chief development officer for Caring for Friends, said that the goal of the organization is to reach as many people as possible. The more people that know about the program, the more donations they can receive, and the more hungry people they can help feed.
Berk called Shir Ami a “perfect partner,” and added that Caring for Friends is an organization rooted in faith, mostly with Catholic partners at the moment. But she’s working to expand its connection to the Jewish community.
“The Jewish community is a new program to us. We are trying to expand into that community because we want everybody to know there are people that are hungry in all five counties,” Berk said. “Just because they live on the Main Line does not mean they’re wealthy; just because they’re in the Jewish community does not mean they’re not hungry. We want people to understand and be able to help us with boots on the ground in all communities, to help people that are hungry and alone.”
She added that tikkun olam is a value many Jewish people and organizations try to live by, and working to feed those in need is a great way to fulfill the value.
Berk said many Jewish organizations already do work to alleviate food insecurity, but it’s her goal to connect those groups to Caring for Friends and be a face for the organization in the Jewish community.
As for Shir Ami, Osborne said he’d love to see its partnership with Caring for Friends continue to grow, maybe with another freezer or other projects in the future.
“So much of what we do is focused on the greater community. We want to be kind and caring neighbors, and so this is a good partnership that allows us to expand our footprint and contribute to the greater Philadelphia area, versus just focusing on what we can accomplish in our own house of worship,” Osborne said.
