WALLINGFORD, Pa.– When Pastor Chuck Kieffer started reaching out to school youth several years ago, he quickly learned two things.
The youth who came to his youth center couldn’t read the Bible. And many of them were going to bed hungry.
Located just outside of Chester, Kieffer quickly learned he was serving a congressional district that had some of the country’s highest rates of hunger.
“We knew we were dealing with a food desert,” he said, but he hadn’t realized how significant the hunger was. And the more he probed, the more he learned how even college students from Widener University were deprived of food. Many students were “couch surfing” from house to house just to finish school.
So Kieffer, pastor of The Foundry Church, and friends — Presidential Service Corps volunteers, to be exact — started feeding them through the church’s nonprofit outreach hub, “Lifewerks.” (“The ‘e’ stands for ’empowerment,’” Kieffer explained.)
And throughout the next decade and more, the Foundry partnered with the World Hunger Fund, Whole Foods, and more recently, Philabundance, as well as many different groups who held food drives on their behalf.
Once a week, students could come and get groceries, and all the while, Kieffer could encourage them to “pay it forward” one day when they weren’t hungry any more.
Many of these students were athletes, whose lack of food affected their athletic performance.
One day, while feeding college soccer players, a soccer coach approached Kieffer and asked him, “I appreciate what you are doing, but could you feed my kids, too?”
So, Lifewerks provided food at an after-school program for all the soccer players at the elementary school. Though the coaches have changed, the program still exists.
Then, Kieffer and his volunteers adopted a local elementary school and began preparing packs of food to give to the kids to take home on the weekends.
For 22 weeks a year, they packed meals with kid-friendly foods in the school cafeterias after teachers noticed how their students had less than sharp minds on Mondays after a weekend with little to no food.
The ministry kept expanding to include nine different sites with 500 kids, co-led by his college student volunteers.
Altogether, the church and volunteers have moved over 50 tons of food just this year!
This effort kept growing and with the help of other partners, such as Appalachian Regional Ministry’s Backpack ministry, it expanded to include backpacks, clothes and even Bibles. In some places, Kieffer and volunteers share art supplies to help in the absence of art program funds at the schools.
Kieffer also has worked with church planters, Jeff Hill of Redemption 1010 and Alonzo Johnson of Believers Bible Fellowship, to distribute food.
After 12 years of such ministry, the Foundry Church was designated as a “healthy pantry” by the Feed America Healthy Pantry initiative. The pantry also was one of ten selected by Philabundance, another hunger relief organization in the Philadelphia region.
But, for Kieffer, it is way more than that.
“We have to get to the next generation’s hearts and minds, but if they can’t think because they are hungry, we can’t get to them,” he said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic set in, Kieffer lost 75% of his volunteers, the bulk of whom were seniors, set to graduate this spring. In their absence, Kieffer had five days to figure out how to staff the food ministries. The church jumped right in. The Alcoholics Anonymous group also jumped in.
“Now, we are doing ministry alongside people in the community,” Kieffer shared, noting an increase in food distribution among new families who recently lost jobs to COVID-19.
Kieffer doesn’t think his community is even close to the real problems ahead.
“The greatest crisis is yet to come,” he forecasted. “We haven’t gotten to the economic fallout [of the pandemic] yet.”
But he isn’t fearful. He looks to the Old Testament’s Joseph, whom God used to provide during the famine.
Out of “abundance,” a word that Kieffer says aptly describes his ministry, Joseph ramped it up — preparing and storing for the famine — for 8 years.
Kieffer, himself, can look back and see how God has prepared them, too. They have 6-7 freezers, professional standard shelving, and continued contacts with local food banks and agencies, all of with whom he has a great working relationship.
But that “abundance” spreads to other ministries that are blossoming in Kieffer’s midst. He seeks to launch an urban youth radio station, where he hopes to help youth learn to tell their stories and grow in leadership.
“I’ve learned to meet needs along the way but we want help their hearts and minds, too,” he explained, pointing to the ‘e’ in Lifewerks.
“E is about empowerment,” he said. “Everything should lead to a conversation.”
