A local charity is scrambling Friday to replace almost 1,500 pounds of food intended for needy kids after it was stolen from storage sheds at a Garden Grove church.
Employees of St. Anselm of Canterbury Episcopal Church arrived around 6 a.m. Wednesday to find the locks to two storage sheds in the parking lot broken and the food inside gone, The Orange County Register reported.
The Santa Ana-based charity Grandma’s House of Hope uses the sheds to store food for its Nana’s Kidz program, which provides meals to kids enrolled in school lunch programs who can’t afford to eat on weekends and after school, the Register reported. The charity uses the parking lot every first Saturday of the month to pack the food into bags.
The food-packing event Saturday is especially important, because students in the Homerun Heroes program and representatives of the Angels are supposed to help pack 5,600 meals.
“This is one of our biggest packing days, and we don’t have any food,” Grandma’s House founder Je’net Kreitner told the Register. “What would take me a month to collect, I basically have to collect tomorrow.”
The Orange County Food Bank and Buena Park-based Giving Children Hope have both reached out to Kreitner and said they would look at what they can spare from their inventory. She said she also plans to purchase as much food as she can from Costco Friday but is also asking for donations. Needed are non- perishables items such as peanut butter, individual containers of juice, canned fruit, canned chicken or roast beef and healthy snacks.
Kreitner told The Register that she will look for another location for food storage and the next packing event, which is scheduled for July.
Anyone who wishes to donate food can drop off non-perishable items between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Friday at Grandma’s House of Hope, 1505 E. 17th St. in Santa Ana. Monetary donations can made online at grandmashouseofhope.org.
—City News Service