The Tribune

By TANYA SMITH-CARTWRIGHT

tsmith-cartwright@tribunemedia.net

THE organiser of an inner-city feeding programme is now appealing to local businesses and food suppliers for assistance as the demand for food heightens.

Rev CB Moss, pastor of Mt Olive Baptist Church, partnering with the Bain, Grants Town Advancement Association, has fed thousands of Bahamians since the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, Rev Moss and his team fed the Bain and Grants Town community for more than 30 years.

He said he sees more demand for food due to the national feeding programme started by the former administration now being absorbed by the Department of Social Services.

“We are appealing for more support, particularly during this high demand period while the government is reorganising their programme,” Rev Moss said. “It really has been a good programme, but we are now facing a cupboard that is growing bare.

“You may have noted that some of the other feeding programmes, like Hands for Hunger or Bahamas Feeding Network, have received large donations from various entities – Lyford Cay gave them $100,000 and so forth.

“It goes back to the old saying, ‘friends got friends’. The people who head those feeding programmes are generally people from that group with friends in Lyford Cay and so forth, which we don’t have. We have never received that sort of support.”

Rev Moss explained how much food has been given out thus far and how the food donations are distributed.

“To date we have distributed well over 26,000 food packages which is a package designed to support a family of four for two to three days,” he said during a recent interview. “In addition, we do prepared meals, lunches and so forth, for those persons who may just have an immediate need to find something to eat.

“We have prepared food today and we give out the packages on Wednesdays. We are going to switch that to Thursdays since the government is not giving out. Thursday is a strategic day because it’s going into the weekend when people consume more food.

“Mt Olive Baptist Church has been providing food assistance to the community for over thirty years and when the pandemic hit last March, we realized that our programme would not be able to support the demand brought on by the pandemic,” Rev Moss said.

He also explained his partnership with the community-based association and how the demand for food grew in his programme.

“So we formed a partnership with the Bain, Grants Town Advancement Association which is the community group that we also are a part of,” Rev Moss said. “That partnership then launched a project called, ‘Feeding Bain and Grants Town’. We then appealed to the public, because we knew that massive amounts of food would be necessary to assist the people in the community.

“Shortly thereafter, the government established the national feeding programme and while that carried the bulk of the load, we still had a whole lot of persons, like the elderly and the disabled, who still could not access the government’s programme. That programme was technology based. You had to go on the computer to access it.

“So we still had that clientele that needed servicing. We took food to the shut-ins and the disabled. That continued fairly well. We had good support, but as the pandemic wore on, a number of our sponsors had reached their limit. Our sponsors were not the well-endowed kind of entities, corporations or individuals.”

Rev Moss said the need for “broad based sponsorship” is great.

“Many of those clients do not have a home to prepare dry food, so you have to feed them prepared food on a regular basis,” he continued.

Many Bahamians had life changing experiences due to the effects of the pandemic and they found themselves needing forms of assistance that they never before imagined they would need.

Rev Moss also sees those people on lines to his feeding programme.

“Some of our clients are very embarrassed because life may be very different for them now,” Rev Moss said. “We try to make it very easy and very comfortable for them. We are not intrusive to inquire who they are or where they come from. We don’t even ask names. The fact that they have come for assistance is enough for us.”