Wesley United Methodist Church Making a Difference in Wiping Out Hunger

On Saturday, December 4, 2021, Our Daily Bread Food Pantry honored Wesley United Methodist Church for their community support to help wipe out hunger in the community. Reverend Bill Fisackerly, lead Pastor for Wesley, accepted the “Hunger Heroes of Distinction” award.

Reverend Bill Fisackerly comes from a long legacy of Methodist ministers. Along with his wife Kim they both have devoted their entire married life to ministering in the State of Florida. Reverend Bill enjoys serving the community and on Saturday mornings he is often seen at the ODBFP Winterberry location greeting the cars as they roll in. According to Reverend Bill, “my role as a prayer volunteer is to connect with people to let them know that we see them, we hear them and we care for them. It might be just for 30 minutes – but it is a simple way to let people know that they are important to us. My pastoral role is to this community, not just the members of my church. I am glad that I was given this chance to love the community through Our Daily Bread Food Pantry.”

I visited ODBFP during a “Wesley Saturday” distribution and observed Reverend Bill with members of his congregation busy helping out. According to Susan Miller, a member of Wesley Church and a regular Pantry volunteer, “ODBFP has been one of Wesley’s ministries for quite some time.” Reverend Bill is a Saturday prayer volunteer and offers to pray with families as they are in line to receive food.

In partnership with ODBFP, Wesley United Methodist Church has been storing hurricane food inventory for ODBFP since July and recently became a distribution center for ODBFP’s Baby Basics program. Baby Basics used to be stored and picked up at the Winterberry site but due to overcrowding, Wesley has offered space on Barfield for diaper storage. ODBFP volunteers will work out of the Wesley campus to process the distribution.

According to Liz Pecora, VP of ODBFP, “it had not been easy moving 26,000 pounds of food per week around the office copier and computer table at our main pantry storage and distribution location at 1450 Winterberry.” When Wesley United Methodist Church offered ODBFP the opportunity to set up dedicated office space, they were so grateful.

Liz was pleased to announce that Baby Basics had its first successful distribution of diapers last Saturday, and it was an enormous help to ODBFP.

What is Baby Basics? According to Jennifer Fey of Baby Basics of Collier County, their mission is to provide and distribute diapers and kindness to babies of low income, working families in Collier County and Bonita Springs. With donations, they purchase diapers and once a month, qualified families come to the closest distribution site to pick up a free month's supply of diapers. Families are screened and referred to this program by local agencies. At each site, volunteers greet the families and help them select the proper size.

For the holidays, members of Wesley United Methodist Church have been practicing Reverse Advent Calendar family tradition at home, filling their bags with food and will then bring them to the church on Christmas Eve.

As part of the countdown to Christmas Day, families and their children are doing something different. Each day, they take an item from their pantry and put them into a box or basket and donate the collection to ODBFP.

According to Liz Pecora, Vice President of ODBFP, they are very appreciative of the tremendous support from Wesley United Methodist Church and their members. It is a huge part of how ODBFP is able to feed so many hungry and needy people in the community.