Whitehall-Coplay Hunger Initiative’s mission is to alleviate food insecurity in Whitehall Township and Coplay Borough.

Just like what Whitehall-Coplay School District is doing for its students and employees, we also are trying to serve our residents by keeping you and our volunteers safe during these unprecedented times.

Please take Gov. Tom Wolf’s order to stay home very seriously.

One person who thinks he is healthy today may be carrying the virus. The virus spreads very quickly; then five more could get it, and so on and so on.

Please make sure to wash your hands often with soap and water. If you do need to go out, try not to touch shared pens, doorknobs and handles, gas station pumps, store checkout machines, handrails, toilet handles, etc., with your fingers or uncovered hands. The virus can stay on these hard services for at least four hours.

Food-related services are considered a necessary, life-sustaining business and are not shut down. The Hunger Initiative volunteers are allowed to be out in an effort to serve you.

The following advice is from Pennsylvania Department of Health on guidance to help not spread COVID-19.

Wash your hands

Washing your hands is one of the most important steps you can take in staying healthy. When you wash, make sure you:

• Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap and apply soap.

• Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap. Lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers and under your nails.

• Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds. Need a timer? Hum the “Happy Birthday” song from beginning to end twice.

• Rinse your hands well under clean, running water.

• Dry your hands using a clean towel or air dry them.

Washing hands with soap and water is the best way to get rid of germs in most situations. If soap and water are not readily available, you can use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains at least 60-percent alcohol. Soap and water is the first choice!

Cough or sneeze

• Cough or sneeze into your elbow or tissue so your mouth and nose are covered. Then, go wash your hands. It is especially important to clean hands after going to the bathroom, before eating and after coughing, sneezing or blowing your nose.

Touch

• Avoid touching your nose, eyes and mouth.

• Greet others with a wave and avoid shaking hands.

Practice social distancing

• Keep at least 6 feet between you and others if you must go out.

• Keep groups to 10 people or less.

• Avoid using mass transit.

Know the facts

Things that are not helpful or effective include:

• Associating COVID-19 with or avoiding a specific population or nationality.

• Wearing a mask if you are not sick.

Please note: All our free community meals have been canceled until further notice.

We do understand and have compassion for our residents in need. The demand for food is high, and we expect it to increase for the foreseeable future as people face long periods of time without work and without a paycheck. We do not have the resources to feed everyone but will do the best we can.

Use this website, lvfpc.org/food-access/, to find a food pantry in the area. This site is updated daily and provides information on pantries throughout the Lehigh Valley that are open. It is best to call the one you wish to visit prior to going there. The closest food pantries include:

• Catasauqua Community Food Bank, 527 Front St. Information: 610-264-8366. Hours of operation: 3-4 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays

• Coplay Food Pantry, located inside Coplay Municipal Building, 98 S. Fourth St. Information: Jodi at 610-262-0928. Hours of operation: Currently closed

• Northampton Area Food Bank, 1601 Canal St. Information: 610-262-8030. Hours of operation: 5-7 p.m. Thursdays and 9 a.m.-noon Saturdays

• Whitehall Food Pantry, located on the left side of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 3900 Mechanicsville Road. Information: 484-246-5715. Hours of operation: 6-8 p.m. Mondays (by appointment only)

This is a call to action for you to let food-insecure residents know we are here for them - babies, children, adults, families and seniors - for our current Whitehall-Coplay outreach program.

Our two summer breakfast site locations will hold a drop-and-go food distribution every Thursday 11 a.m.-noon and again 6-7 p.m. at the following locations:

• Redeemed Christian Church of God, 5 N. Third St., Coplay. Information: call/text Carol Clancy at 610-360-6305

• St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, 835 Third St., Whitehall. Information: call/text Lana Snyder at 610-533-1357

Coplay residents are to come to the sidewalk at the front of the side door of the church on Coplay Street. The church is on the corner of Coplay and North Third streets.

Whitehall residents are to turn at Third and Quarry streets and go through the church parking lot on the right of the street to Cherry Alley. Cars will go up the alley and stop at the door with the ramp for distribution and then turn back onto Third Street.

For those who do not have transportation or have other food needs, call or text 610-730-8067.

Whitehall-Coplay Hunger Initiative joined forces with many local partners to make this new outreach program a success. We planned and implemented this program in five days. We held our first distribution March 26.

It was amazing and very gratifying to know we helped 143 children and 10 adults. Everyone received a bag of nonperishable food.

We did not do this alone by any means. Without the following partners, this program would not be in action now:

• Both church sites’ permission to operate this program and all our member volunteers and parishioners from St. John’s Lutheran Church. This support has been overwhelming. We practiced ServSafe food-handling rules and regulations and the 19 volunteer screenings and guidelines.

• Thank you, Whitehall-Coplay School District. Dr. Lorie Hackett, school district superintendent, called March 14 to discuss possible location sites to distribute food to the students in the district. I gave her and Wayne Walp, food service director, several site ideas.

They decided to use the high school as the drop-and-go location for all students 10 a.m.-noon.

This was very smart of them to do it this way. It keeps the children, parents and school workers all safe.

Also, the school was convenient for preparing and distributing the food all at one location. Each day, children received a lunch and a breakfast for the following day.

According to Walp, approximately 107 children were served daily March 18-20.

On March 23, Walp decided to go with a two-day distribution and served 215 students.

On March 25, Walp did a three-day distribution and served 249 children.

In all, he and his kitchen staff served 1,498 students and prepared almost 3,000 meals. Many Lehigh Valley school districts have gone to this multiple-day distribution. It makes a lot of sense.

Leah Saliby is an eighth-grade English teacher at Whitehall-Coplay Middle School and has a heart of gold. With the data from the school’s participation in the 2013 Pays Survey, Saliby noticed that 16.1 percent of WCMS students worried where their next meal was coming from.

If you know Saliby like I do, her students mean the world to her, and being a teacher, she understands children have a harder time learning if they are hungry.

With Pete Bugbee, the school principal at the time, and Hackett’s approval, Saliby created and implemented her inspiring Snack Pack Pals program at the school district. She receives food from Second Harvest Food Bank, school and public food drives and monetary donations.

When school was open, children from various clubs would come and help pack the bags. Northwestern Lehigh, Parkland and Northern Lehigh school districts have modeled programs after hers.

Michelle Khouri, school district registrar, with Hackett’s permission, sent an email to all the apartment building property managers to let the residents know about the school meal distributions.

The district website was updated March 27 and shows the distribution days and times. The second week she noticed the numbers increased.

Khouri also sent out robocalls to the 230 Snack Pack Pals recipients and contacted her media connections to feed food-insecure people in Whitehall and Coplay. She may have done much more than I know about. We are very grateful.

• Second Harvest Food Bank has also helped us. We are a member and classified as a soup kitchen. We picked up 2,000 pounds of food recently and are scheduled every Wednesday through August to do this.

Understand that Second Harvest is not a grocery store. It receives product from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the state, along with various donations from area stores. Many times, it does not carry products we can use. It provides the food to food pantries and soup kitchens for six counties. The food pantries and the soup kitchens provide the food to the public through various agencies and service providers, like us.

• Walmart in Whitehall donated many items to us last week, including toilet paper. It also will help us as it can with future distributions.

• Hokey Fire Hall has been a long friend and supporter of both the Snack Pack Pals program and our summer breakfast program. The group donated food to us last week. More importantly, seven volunteers helped load our truck at Second Harvest and then unloaded it at St. John’s in Whitehall.

We are so grateful to each one of them. Two thousand pounds was a lot, and the volunteers were beat when the unloading was finished.

• Thank you to Diocese of Allentown Local Poverty Relief Fund, which gives us a grant every year to operate our summer program later this year, and to Mary Spieker, director of religious education at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church. Spieker is taking food bags to her Snack Pack recipients.

• We had many personal shoppers pick up items we still needed. Susan Falkenstein, who also created Angel Resources, a food and clothing ministry, is an expert shopper. She and Diane Davidson, Whitehall Area Rotary Club president, both picked up items.

• Doreen Wagner, Whitehall Food Pantry coordinator, did not have a food distribution planned for March 30 since the food bank does not operate on a fifth Monday.

She had a lot of fresh produce that would have spoiled by the April 6 pantry distribution, so she donated it to the Hunger Initiative.

Carol Clancy and Lana Snyder contacted all the parents of children who participate in the summer breakfast program and distributed this perishable food March 30. It would not make our Thursday distribution.

• And, of course, the public in general have been wonderful in picking up and delivering needed food to me at my Re/Max Unlimited office at 1080 Schadt Ave., Whitehall.

The office is closed, but the food is brought inside every day. A list of needed items will be posted on our Facebook page later this week.

Also, as was the case in the 2008 market crash, please look out for your neighbors. This pandemic will end sometime this year.

I do not want to see residents having to give up their pets like in 2008. I saw the hardship and emotional distress on people having to do this with animals they love because they did not have the extra money to feed them. We are also providing a small supply of dog and cat food.

Reach out to your neighbors and make sure they are not in any need. If everyone would reach out to people who live on either side of the street, we all would be a community at its best.