Food Pantry Gets Bilingual Volunteers After Help Call

When a Pennsylvania food network needed bilingual volunteers to help Spanish-speaking families access food assistance, the community showed up in force.

Schuylkill Food Network puts on eight food distributions every month across the county, sometimes running two in a single day. But organizers noticed a growing problem: more families needed help, but language barriers were keeping volunteers from connecting with Spanish-speaking residents.

So they put out a call for bilingual volunteers. The response was immediate and overwhelming.

"We get emails regularly, but after the initial call for help, we got an immediate response from a lot of people," said Bradley Dougherty, the network's coordinator. "It's always nice to see, and we just invite them all over the place now."

The surge of new helpers is giving longtime volunteers a much-needed boost. These monthly distributions require serious hustle, and the core group of regular volunteers was feeling stretched thin.

"It's a relief," Dougherty said. "This is a lot of hard work, especially for the volunteers who are always there. To have new people come in, kind of fresh blood, and it's nice to see everybody get to know each other and work together."

The Ripple Effect

The bilingual volunteers aren't just helping hand out food. They're opening doors to other services that Spanish-speaking families didn't even know existed.

"It gives us the opportunity to communicate our other services to Spanish-speaking clients that we can't really get to because we can't communicate with them properly," Dougherty explained. Now families can learn about additional support programs in their own language.

The added support is making each distribution more welcoming. When volunteers can speak directly with families in their preferred language, it builds trust and makes asking for help feel less intimidating.

With more helping hands bridging communication gaps, the food network is better equipped than ever to fight food insecurity one family at a time.