Members of the Pelham community gathered on Wednesday morning to fill their cars with boxes of food destined for the offices of Family Services of Westchester, the culmination of a month-long effort known to all as Thanksgiving-in-a-Box.
The headquarters of the annual operation is the parking lot behind Huguenot Memorial Church. On most weekdays the lot is filled with cars dropping off or picking up children from the Huguenot Nursery School, but every year on the morning before Thanksgiving, it becomes the launching platform for an armada of vehicles–cars, vans and a large U-Haul truck–which will distribute more than 1,000 boxes of food to the people who need it most.
At the helm of this quasi-military operation–directing volunteers to load boxes into caravans destined for Port Chester, Yonkers, Mt. Vernon and White Plains–is Tina Constable, who founded the program 20 years ago at Huguenot.
“We started modestly doing 25 boxes the first year, then 50, and now we’ve grown to delivering 1,000 boxes per year,” she said. “We partner with Family Services of Westchester, which is a group that offers services to families across Westchester.”
The program has grown dramatically since its modest beginnings by reaching out to other houses of worship, whose members were eager to participate. “Over the years, we’ve grown to include all of the other interfaith organizations in Pelham,” she said. Those partners include the Pelham Jewish Center, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, St. Catharine’s, Christ Church, and Pelham Community Church.
Another turning point came just over a decade ago, when Manor Market embraced the program. “We started partnering with Manor Market and that has been the difference that enabled us to scale the operation from a couple of hundred boxes to one thousand boxes. We couldn’t do it without Alan Brodsky and his team at Manor Market!”
Thanksgiving in-a-box volunteer Maddie Day said, “I think it’s a really good system that gives back to people who don’t have the opportunity to buy food.”
Steffanie Willis, whose family has supported Thanksgiving in-a-box for the past 10 years, said, “It’s important to give back to the community, particularly during the holiday season.”
