Local nonprofit Feeding the Spirit hosts annual fundraiser, notes increase in community need

Feeding the Spirit was founded in 2011 to provide food to those in need of a hot meal.

Today, it serves about 250 meals every Thursday night at Greensburg’s Otterbein United Methodist Church and offers a wide range of crisis intervention support — all with grant funding and donations from the community.

A fundraiser Sept. 30 in South Greensburg will help Feeding the Spirit continue providing its resources to Westmoreland County.

Rent assistance, temporary housing, access to hygiene and paper products and reimbursement for expenses such as gas and photo identification are among the aid Feeding the Spirit provides.

In 2022, the nonprofit provided temporary housing to 854 individuals, assisted with 285 rent payments and served more than 10,000 hot meals.

It was named the 2022 Nonprofit of the Year by the Westmoreland County Chamber of Commerce for these efforts.

As a nonprofit, all of these efforts are made possible by volunteers, grants and donations — of money, food, household items, clothes and more.

“We only exist because the people in this county have such big hearts,” founder Deb Thackrah said.

The need for Feeding the Spirit’s services increased during the pandemic, Thackrah said, and it remains high today — particularly for housing assistance.

There has been an increase in the number of people losing their homes in the past year, Thackrah said.

From January to June, Feeding the Spirit provided temporary housing to 289 individuals for 385 nights, which cost more than $21,000. More than $73,000 went toward assisting 235 families with rent payments.

Also in the first half of the year, the nonprofit has served about 5,500 meals.

It donated just shy of $15,000 for assistance with utilities, gas and medical expenses. In all of 2022, the nonprofit spent $16,000 on these expenses.

The need for emergency food assistance has significantly increased in Westmoreland County, Westmoreland Food Bank CEO Jennifer Miller said.

Prior to the pandemic, the food bank received about two calls per month for emergency assistance, Miller said. The organization was seeing about three to five calls a day from people in immediate need of food, Miller said in July.

Similar trends were noticed by the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, which released its annual statistics on Sept. 1.

From July 2022 to June 2023, the food bank received more than 17,900 calls for food assistance — a 12% increase from the previous year.

It distributed enough food for nearly 42 million meals to more than 429,000 people across 11 counties, which is a 2 million-meal increase from 2020.

“It’s not easy being human today in today’s world,” Thackrah said. “We’re all really just one catastrophe away from starting that spiral down.”

At last year’s fundraising event, the nonprofit brought in about $6,000, fundraising coordinator Michelle Havrilesko said.

Although the fundraiser will help generate financial support, Thackrah said raising awareness of community needs and the nonprofit’s mission is most important.

“We look at each individual crisis,” Thackrah said. “And we listen and we try to remove the barriers so that they don’t spiral down.”