To all members of Philomath Community Gleaners
For a couple of weeks now, there have been numerous texts, emails and complaints about the length of
process and wait times on Saturday to pick up your weekly food. I wish to address these concerns in this Blog so that by Saturday there will be none moving forward.
WHY CHANGES HAPPENED...
With the current COVID-19 trickle down effects and the mandated stay-at-home declaration by Governor Brown, we have had to make sweeping changes to the Gleaner program in order first to preserve the program while protecting volunteers and second to continue to provide needed food to our Gleaner families.
GLEANERS OBLIGATIONS CONTINUE…
Philomath Community Gleaners is still responsible for more than 23 pickups per week. They happen 7
days a week. A couple of weeks ago, we were responsible for 34 because of extras that were offered.
We chose to take them to provide as much food as possible to our members.
These pickups are being done by the same core group of volunteers that nearly every day of the week is
handling repack, running to the warehouse, picking up commodity boxes, delivering to adoptee and
shelter in place families and handling full distribution of more than 12 hours every single Saturday. The
hours of volunteer time on Saturday alone exceeds 105 hours...with those same 8-10 volunteers. On top of those duties is the office tasks which exceed the normal reports and book-keeping, which is now
involving order sheets, request lists, maintaining a Blog for communication, additional grant writing to
secure emergency funds and looking for ways to procure food that is no longer coming through our
regular system, so everyone continues to have food.
THE REASON WHY OUR CREW IS SMALL…
Would we love extra help, absolutely. Why we made the decisions to keep the group small is
1) To limit personal exposure at the site to one another, keeping in compliance with social distancing
2) To limit risk to and from additional families outside of the core group.
We need to keep in mind that our group is comprised of more than 65% of people in the higher risk
categories.
The current work load vs. volunteer limitations is a weekly discussed topic and all involved feel the risk is too great to start bringing in more volunteers at this time. It is most important that we make every effort to keep our families safe.
WHAT IS BEING DONE TO KEEP GLEANER FAMILIES SAFE...
Gleaner efforts to keep our families safe include frequent sanitizing of high traffic areas and contact
points, masks for all volunteers while working in proximity of food to be distributed and within proximity of others, gloves when handling all foods and proper disposal or sanitization of all PPE. We continue to practice social distancing wherever possible in the process of Gleaning food and all other processes involving distribution.
GUIDELINES MOVING FORWARD
Please carefully read this section, you will be responsible for these guidelines from here on. We ask all of our members to do your part and follow these guidelines:
1. Please be patient:
We are always working to make our process better. Variability in food product makes that a new task
every week. We work from 7am until after 9pm some weeks to make this happen.
2. Please remain fully in your car:
To respect the restrictions on the park by the river and to limit exposure to other members who are
waiting, it is vital that everyone remain in their car for the duration of their wait time. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Leave your dog at home, keep your children occupied or leave them at home and please no walking
around, exercising or yoga...our parking lot is not an open park. This is not a request, this is a
requirement, members who do not follow this requirement will be asked to leave the line and WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO RETURN. Members violating this rule will be suspended from the Gleaner Program until we return to normal operations. This is for the safety of everyone at PCS. We will NOT make exceptions to willful violations of this rule
3. The bathroom at PCS is not available to outside traffic until further notice. No exceptions
4. Please do not come hang out at the side door:
To protect everyone inside and at the site, please, please, please do not come hang out at the side door.
Many of you come without masks, grab the door handles and door frames and wish to visit. We miss you all and wish to have time to visit more, but now is not the time and certainly at the main traffic door is not the place.
5. Please direct genuine complaints to the gleaners@philomathcommunityservices email.
This allows for proper documentation and allows for all officers to review them and decide upon a
unanimous course of action. Alicia will no longer be addressing these kind of concerns, emails or other direct communications to her phone or via reply to the Gleaner texts. This has become very time
consuming and is an unnecessary task for her to be expected to fulfill as the Gleaner Secretary.
Complaints will be handled in a timely manner. The last one was resolved in two days of filing.
6. Please refrain from Unnecessary Phone Calls to our personal phones or PCS phone line.
Added phone calls only eat up work time. We answer 10-15 calls every Saturday morning. Please don't call to ask if it is worth coming to pick up your free food. Please don't call to ask if you can skip the line. Please don't call to ask if you can come on Monday and please don't ask when the delivery crew is arriving with your box of food.
7. Complaints about food choices, and time waiting in line:
It is difficult to be patient with complaints of quality of food, non-organic food choices, dessert preferences and wait times.
As to the food selection, every family is receiving hundreds of dollars in food every single week. Since we cannot offer on site shopping, we take extra time for each and every one of you to try and tailor food choices that you prefer within the limits of the food we have available.
For the wait times... every pickup volunteer on Saturday waits until after their duties just like the rest of
you. For the core group, we are waiting 10-12 hours to take our food home at the end of the work day.
Most weeks we do the bulk of our shopping last. There is little to no program anywhere in Linn and
Benton County that is offering the kind of food we have for no cost.
Please consider the contribution and time of those around you who are supporting this program in this extraordinarily difficult time.
TO ALL OF OUR FAMILIES…
We miss our Gleaner families and members and hope for a quick return to the days where we can be a
complete Gleaner community once again. Please do all you can to take the best care of yourselves, you
families, friends and your neighbors. Help where and when you can and be good stewards of all that you have. Thank you for your contributions in making our program the incredible program that it is.
Sincerely,
Catherine, Patty and Alicia, and our families who support us while we support you.
