ST. CLAIRSVILLE — A new freezer has arrived at the Food Pantry of St.Clairsville.

Kathi Vaughn, director of the pantry, said the recent purchase was made possible from a grant by the Belmont County Enrichment Fund of $1,100.

She added that the grant fully covered the purchase of a new freezer that was desperately needed to help the pantry store the amount of meat it receives.

Vaughn said the number of residents the pantry serves has drastically increased within the last five years, which means more food needs to be stored on site to ensure that no resident goes hungry.

“We were serving maybe 40 to 50 people a month, and now we’re serving that many in a week,” Vaughn said.

She added that another hurdle she is facing is the rising cost of food nationwide.

“COVID is gone and people are back to work, but here’s the big problem: food prices have gone up. They’ve escalated 35% since 2019, 35% in food prices alone,” she said. “The other issue is that since 2019, here in Belmont County and here in the state of Ohio, the number of people who need a food pantry has almost doubled. So what it’s coming down to is that the funding that we’re getting is back to 2019 levels, but we’re being asked to serve 2025 needs.”

It’s going to affect everybody, because basically what happened was food banks, just like at grocery stores, and everything else, the food that they want in May, they order in January and February. And what happened was, they were expecting all this food to come in starting in May and go through the summer. And these are the Mid-Ohio Food Bank, where we are, and I think they told us that it was like 700,000 pounds of food that was ordered that’s not coming in, and it was stuff like, it was what we call middle of the plate food. It was meat, dairy, and eggs, I mean, good, solid protein. And it’s not just Mid-Ohio, it was across the United States. All those shipments were stopped, so we’re fighting that now, and I’m going to tell you that in St Clairsville, the community has always been so generous.”

She then mentioned a recent update with the pantry’s Blessing Box.

Vaughn recently took to social media and said that the Blessing Box has depleted its resources and she is looking for residents who are able to to step up and donate non-perishable food that residents in need can stop by and take 24 hours a day.

She said that within 24 hours of posting the call to action on social media the Blessing Box has been blessed to the brim with non-perishable foods.

“It’s just amazing, truly, you can’t say enough about the community and the people around here and the businesses and the organizations, because we are 100% funded by donations. Everything that we get goes directly into the food that we have, and the only thing we pay for is our utilities, and that’s it. So when we need a new freezer or something breaks, we go out and we beg for a grant,” Vaughn said.

The Blessing Box is located next to the St. Clairsville Municipal Building at 100 N. Market St. and is available for anyone who needs it 24 hours a day.

Vaughn added that during the summer, she sees the need for the pantry and blessing box due to the children being out of school. She said that a lot of individual heat-and-eat meals fly off the shelf at the blessing box because of the simplicity of preparing them to eat.

“If parents come in, we ask them if they’ve got kids at home. Because when people come in to get food they’re asked, you know, how much they make or anything, but we ask them how many are in your family? Do you have little kids? And then they get to pick out the food that we have, because a lot of times, some of my volunteers are big softies, and they’ll put together packages of candy and stuff,” Vaughn said.

She added that regardless of how expensive food prices rise she will make it a priority to make sure that the pantry never runs out of food.

“May is a big month, June, July, and big, so you just kind of look at it and say, Okay, we try to plann, we always plan for about 40 to 50 people each week, meaning, when we go out and get milk and eggs, we want to make sure that we have enough so that everybody that comes in gets them, because our big thing is we’re not going to run out of food,” Vaughn said.