Rewriting Goals

The Dubuque Food Pantry (hopefully my new service site) was started by Immanuel Congregational United Church of Christ. When it expanded, it moved to a larger location, and is now only a block away from the church. I’m going to be going to there on Friday to talk to Sister Lynn and hopefully start working there. I have no idea what she’ll have me doing there, but hopefully some human interaction will be involved. The food pantry provides for people within the community by giving food that has been donated to those who need it. They give food only to people who have been recommended to them. Many people will call Immanuel Congregational United Church of Christ so that the church can recommend them to the food pantry. They also collect food items for the pantry each week. They have an event that gathers even more food around the time of the Superbowl. In this way, they have managed to stay connected with the pantry and the community.

Looking back at my goals from a month ago, I think I can achieve most of them, though probably not all of them.

They were:
1. Learn about the community
2. Learn about the church.
3. Grow in communicating with other people.
4. Start something with the church that could turn into something more.

I am still learning about the community. I think this will increase with my exposure to the food pantry (regardless of what I do there), and also with the history of the church Carla and I have been doing. I’ve already learned more about it, so I’m well on my way to reaching this goal. Bob has been a great resource for this, and I’ve learned a lot about the community from him.

I also am learning about the church. Carla and I will be meeting with Pastor Sue to learn more about the doctrines. I’m interested to hear how it differs from Catholicism, especially because I’m not as well versed on my Protestant religions as I’d like to be. We’ll also be reading a lot of information about it, so this should help us as well. The church has provided us with a lot of documents to shift through, and we’re learning more about how it’s involved itself in the community.

So far, I’ve only been communicating with Sister Lynn, Pastor Sue, and Bob, but I expect this to change. I know I’ll meet more people on Friday at the food pantry. Carla and I have also realized that the church documents will not be sufficient enough to help us with the church’s history of participation in the community. The newspapers we’ve found haven’t really been enough either. We think the best approach will be to go talk to the older parishioners. We’re hoping they’ll be able to tell us more about the church’s community involvement. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to speak with people I don’t know very well.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to start a sustainable project that the church can use indefinitely. I think they’ve done well on their own with their food pantry- it’s come a long way, especially if it’s become its own entity. I think I want to change this one to helping the churches with intercommunication, because they don’t seem to have a strong of a connection to each other. I think they could connect better to the community if they did. Carla and I will be talking to Pastor Sue and Bob about the group that Joe has mentioned in class several times. I think this will help them with the connection. Through Bob, the church already has a strong relationship with the community and its decisions. I think helping them connect with other churches will be beneficial in getting more churches to connect with the community. Bob and Pastor Sue would like something like this to happen. I think our class can use the group Joe has talked about to make this a reality.