Whitehall-Coplay Hunger Initiative is a 501(c)3 public charity, and we are 100% volunteer. It is extremely important to me to personally thank everyone who helps us fulfill our mission statement: to alleviate food insecurity in Whitehall and Coplay. Thank you, all!

Addressing food insecurity is done primarily with three of our food programs.

Our free community meals are offered twice a month on the first Sunday and third Tuesday of the month. The 2026 free meal schedule can be found on our website at whitehallcoplayhungerinitiative.org.

Our WCHI garden is overseen by Gwen Herzog, who also writes about it monthly. Call Gwen at 610-379-6823 to help at the garden.

The third program is our WCHI Food Pantry. Jenn Dietz also writes monthly on our Healthy Pantry Initiative. WCHI has been designated as one of 10 healthy pantries in Lehigh County by Second Harvest Food Bank. We are one of the original three.

For today’s article, I wanted to focus on the blessing of having wonderful, passionate pantry volunteers who choose from a myriad of tasks they are interested in accomplishing. Many hands make our WCHI pantry run seamlessly.

These tasks include, but are not limited to, weekly ordering and picking up food from Second Harvest and local grocery stores, unloading our truck, placing the cases in our pantry on appropriate pallets and moving the food items to one of our 11 categories of food racks and two toiletry racks. Each rack has three shelves. Refrigerated and frozen foods are also placed in designated refrigerators and freezers.

Volunteers also register our pantry guests, and others take them through our pantry with a grocery cart. Our guests select the foods they will eat, stopping at each rack. The number of food items taken are preset on the top of the rack based on the number of people living in their household.

Another volunteer takes the wagon up a ramp from our basement to the main outside level. The carts are then pushed to our guest’s car and unloaded, and the cart is brought back inside for a new guest to go shopping.

WCHI is fortunate to have Whitehall-Coplay School District’s SERVE Club students help us at every nightly food distribution. They are committed to doing this until school ends in June.

We also have volunteers who work from their homes, like our treasurer, our website and our free meal Facebook coordinators and our new 2026 donation thank you corresponding secretary.

WCHI needs and wants people to share their talents with us. If you have time and a talent you believe would advance and strengthen our mission, email our volunteer coordinator at volunteerme.lee@gmail.com.

Two WCHI board members told me why they volunteer.

Cindy said, “Volunteering at WCHI impacts the lives of others struggling with hunger, while building great relationships with other like-minded people, and it keeps me moving forward!”

Gwen noted, “Part of my retirement plan was to give back, and my parents set the example by volunteering at their local food bank.”