After the holiday season is over local charities experience a decrease in the amount of donations.
After the holiday season is over local charities experience a decrease in the amount of donations.
The Rome Rescue Mission serves 200 meals every day, 365 days a year.
“We serve so many families, for Christmas alone we did 277 to-go meals,” said Destiny Branfalt, an administrative assistant at the mission. “All of that food gets used and it definitely needs to be replenished after the holidays.”
Branfalt said one of the ways to support the mission is by donating gas cards to their Mobile Mission, which can be used to help serve people all year long.
“We actually do use it for transportation of picking up donations from people and bringing them down to our free store,” she said. “But we also use it in the winter to hand out coats, gloves, hats, scarves, things like that to people who can’t necessarily get here.”
Jim Haid, executive director at the Rescue Mission of Utica, said the mission could also use more support throughout the year.
“Between all of our various programs, whether it’s the West Street project, whether it’s the emergency shelter, our enriched living center, we are probably providing almost 60,000 nights of stay a year,” he said. “I mean that’s incredible. We’re serving over 200,000 meals a year. We have a learning center, we have a job training program, our skills for success program, so we’re seeing literally thousands and thousands of people in our community.”
Haid said any kind of donation will make a difference.
“We have a lot of mixture of things here… at the rescue mission and our various ministries to help people become whole and get off social services, to turn their lives around, rebuild relationships, ” he said. “Of course we need that and we’re blessed by our community. But we also see being a faith-based organization, we know that we are blessed with everything we’re doing here.”
For more information or to donate visit:
