Season of giving on the Kenai Peninsula

Catholic parishes on the Kenai Peninsula are lending helping hands to neighbors this winter amid climbing food costs. Organizations balance year-round giving with specific weekly food and gas donations as well as other giving like the annual Coats for Kids.

“It’s the giving season all year round — not just at Thanksgiving and Christmas,” said Father Jaime Mencias, parochial administrator at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Homer and St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Ninilchik.

“We attend daily to the needs of people who are struggling.”

According to a study by Feeding America called Map the Meal Gap, food insecurity estimates for Alaska show 12.8 percent, just below 94,000 people, of families throughout the state are counted as vulnerable. That’s about two percentage points above the level encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Daniel Bentle, the chief philanthropy officer for the Alaska Food Bank.

That number of people suffering from food insecurity is slightly higher on the Kenai Peninsula, at 13.5 percent of the population, according to the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank’s annual report.

A collection box continually takes donations at the back of St. John’s church to be divided up at the Homer Food Pantry to 150 families per week served there.

Another 15-20 fuel and food cards are given out each month at the church as people line up to receive them in lengthy lines. The money funding this outreach comes from parishioner donations and visitors or tourists who contribute to St. John’s, Father Jaime said.

The outreach has many arms.

At St. John’s Pick ‘n’ Pay Thrift Store, families in need can select clothing free of charge in cases where that is a need, he said.

“There are so many needs, and we attend to all of them that we can. A lot of the homeless are living in their cars or campers, so they’ll use the fuel cards to help keep themselves warm by running the engine,” Father Jaime said.

The Homer church collections go toward feeding 150 families that reach out to the Homer Food Pantry each week. They help serve another 60-90 families at Anchor Point, about 20 miles north of Homer. The Women’s Guild, which raises funds through the Pick ‘n’ Pay Thrift Store, gives $300 a month from its proceeds to the Anchor Point Food Pantry, says Missy Martin.

Homer’s members of the Knights of Columbus also help in a variety of ways as well to support the Anchor Point Food Pantry and the Homer one, including volunteering their time.

“It’s (from) homeless people all the way to those who have jobs,” said St. John’s parishioner Martin. “A fourth of our clients are children, another one-fourth are senior citizens. And there’s a significant number of veterans there. They run the gamut, trying to pay rent, buy food, pay for medicine and gas – those are their choices when it comes to limited money. I hear a lot about how ‘I can pay my rent now because I’ve received this help with food.’”

The story of need among the population is repeated elsewhere on the Kenai Peninsula where the food safety net is stretched thin. Families feel the pinch of a 19 percent hike in grocery costs since 2019, according to numbers from the Alaska Department of Labor, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News.

“On the Kenai Peninsula we have a lot of the invisible poor,” said Father Patrick Brosamer, pastor at Our Lady of the Angels Parish in Kenai and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Soldotna. “In Anchorage, they live out in the open, but here you might not see those who are homeless because they live out of the public view in tents or campers in the woods.”

Each year, September launches the annual competition between the Kenai and Soldotna congregations to see which parish can collect the highest number of pounds in canned and imperishable groceries.

Those collections go to the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank, which feeds about 515 individuals a week, said food bank coordinator Carolyn Lopez.

“At the end of September, we do a weigh-in to see which church gets the glory,” Father Brosamer said. Each parish typically collects over 1,000 pounds to send to the food bank.

Lopez said the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank can’t do it without support from the Kenai-Soldotna Catholic churches.

Knights of Columbus members in Homer support the Anchor Point and Homer food pantries, including volunteering their time.

Working smoothly from annual to seasonal charity projects is something the parishioners do. Knights of Columbus are happy to become adept at year-round giving, said Rick Hoover.

“We’re seen as the Pancake Guys because of our breakfasts, but we do a lot more than that – and we’ve only just started back up on the peninsula since 2018,” Hoover said. From Homer to Soldotna, there are now 100 Knights of Columbus members.

Knights’ donations come in addition to the seasonal programs continued at each parish. Rick Hoover said it’s a lot of charity work they are able to do year-round thanks to the tickets sold for a drawing for bison hunts on Kodiak Island. They raised about $2,900 for the Coats for Kids program that supplies outdoor wear for 160 children from Nanwalek and Port Graham to the Russian Old Believer villages, Homer, and Ninilchik, Hoover said.

“We pass out order forms to elementary kids all the way to Ninilchik and we’ve done this for four years now,” Hoover said. “We do it by selling tickets to the bison hunts. Everyone is so generous with the raffles.”

To show how they stretch out the charity work, Hoover points out that in the August Walk for Life, 60 participants raised $4,000 for the Water’s Edge Pregnancy Center in Homer. The money goes for diapers and baby clothing. They also were able to raise funds to help purchase an ultrasound machine that helped save three lives from abortion as of early October.

On the Kenai Peninsula, the work of giving doesn’t take a break after New Year’s, Hoover said. “We’re blessed to start over again.”