A Good Friday for West Modesto Collaborative, offering food to those in need
Good Friday was a great one in west Modesto.
On April 2, the holy day of Good Friday for Christians, the West Modesto Community Collaborative hosted a drive-through food giveaway at the King-Kennedy Memorial Center.
“Sometimes we struggle for food,” said Lucilla Rojas, a west Modesto resident for more than two decades, speaking through a Spanish interpreter at the event.
Rojas said she had helped support her household of four adults and one child before losing her job when the pandemic closed the daycare center where she worked.
“We have 1,200 food boxes and we’ll stay until we give them all away,” said Natali Montoya, case manager for the West Modesto Community Collaborative.
Montoya leads a program to deliver food and other supplies to people in the surrounding community who test positive for COVID-19 and have to stay in isolation. ZIP codes in west Modesto have had some of the highest COVID-19 cases rates in Stanislaus County.
“This is a USDA-funded program and we were selected as one of the (distribution) sites,” said Perfecto Munoz, executive director of the collaborative.
The boxes of fresh produce and milk were delivered by Daylight Foods, one of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers-to-Families programs. Daylight Foods is based in the Bay Area and will deliver the food boxes to the King-Kennedy Center every Friday morning through May. Boxes are distributed on a first-come basis.
The mission of the West Modesto Collaborative is to develop a community that strives to create a safe, productive environment through the promotion of health and education for children and families.
It has several programs that provide support services to the surrounding neighborhood, including additional health education and resources during COVID-19.
This story was produced with financial support from The Stanislaus County Office of Education and the Stanislaus Community Foundation, along with the GroundTruth Project’s Report for America initiative. The Modesto Bee maintains full editorial control of this work. To help fund The Bee’s children’s health and economic development reporters with Report for America, go to bitly.com/ModbeeRFA
This story was originally published April 3, 2021 at 6:48 AM.
