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Rotary clubs, community, holding food drive for Easter

T-L Photo/ROBERT A. DEFRANK St. Clairsville Rotarian Kirke Porterfield stands with some of the foodstuffs the club is collecting to give a Happy Easter dinner to families dealing with hard times during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — The city Rotary clubs remain active in responding to the community’s needs, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After holding food drives for the Christmas and Valentine’s Day holidays, the Rotarians launched another food drive with the goal of providing means to celebrate for the less fortunate.

Rotarian Kirke Porterfield said he and fellow club members will be delivering ham and all the trimmings to families who might not otherwise have the means to celebrate.

“Both the Rotary clubs in St. Clairsville, the noon club and the sunrise, this will be our third food giveaway. It’s basically an Easter dinner,” he said. “We’re hoping to have enough funding to do some other items, soaps and paper towels, different things that people need that we could help out with.

“We raised some money on St. Patrick’s Day,” he said, adding the Rotarians worked with Matt Welsch, owner of Vagabond Kitchen in Wheeling.

“He made a delicious Irish stew and a lot of the members went down and waited on tables and bussed tables,” Porterfield said. “He gave us a percent of all the proceeds.”

Porterfield said anyone wishing to donate to help feed more people can drop off money at Porterfield’s Drive-Thru Farm or Kirke’s Homemade Ice Cream at 50525 Rehm Road, or via the St. Clairsville Rotary Facebook page.

Porterfield added the need persists because people have lost work hours and employment, and although there are signs of a return to normalcy, there is no telling how long the economic recovery will take.

“We’re going to make the deliveries April 1, April 2 and April 3. We’re hoping to do somewhere between 30 and 40 families in the St. Clairsville area,” he said. “It’s a little higher than normal. We’ve got a little more money to work with this time, and if more people continue to donate, the more people we can help out, the better.

“We’ll do this for Easter and help as many people as we can, and if anybody knows of anybody that’s in need, have them get ahold of myself or (President) Melinda Thompson through the Rotary Facebook page and we’ll see what we can do to help.”

Porterfield added that it has been particularly important that the clubs remain active during the pandemic, even though COVID-19 restrictions and precautions had curtailed many of their normal social events.

“(Tuesday) we had our first in-person Rotary meeting for the last several months,” he said. “Everybody stayed active even though we didn’t have in-person meetings, we had the Zoom meetings. But it seems like we had a project going on all the time.

“It’s very rewarding to do this. It makes you feel good to help people that are kind of down on their luck a little bit,” Porterfield said.

Porterfield said Tuesday’s meeting also included a virtual talk by U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, who was unable to attend in person.

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