“Flashback to a little over two years ago when our family was surviving on fast food drive-thru, ramen noodles and prepackaged snacks. Wendy’s 4 for $4 made it cheaper for our family of five to eat out rather than cook at home.
We joined Love Your Neighbor’s Life Skills Program in hopes of getting back on our feet financially and learning how to live within our means. From our intake meeting we learned that we would be earning groceries each week that we attended the program, which at the time wasn’t anything too exciting.
Little did we know the true effect that the weekly food from the food pantry would have on our family. We started the program in October of 2020. Our family wasn’t eating together. We would take orders, pick it up, pass it out, and everyone would go their separate ways.
Little by little a change was being made. It started with the milk and cereal before school and work. Then it was getting up a little earlier and making eggs and toast. We started with breakfast and it caused a domino effect onto the other meals of the day. We started cooking dinner more than eating out. We would even cook extra for lunch for the next day. We started finding new recipes and trying them out.
The food pantry offers such a wide variety of options that we spent very little on food. We would get back from work and get the kids from activities and cook together as a family to bring us closer together. We were eating together at the dinner table every night and takeout meals became a rarity.
“Not only did the food help bring our family together, it also helped us stabilize our lives financially. We took the money we were spending on take out and groceries and put that towards paying off debt, and once that was accomplished we were able to start making an emergency savings fund.”
Before this we were barely surviving paycheck to paycheck, so being able to put some money in savings was a completely new experience. Our family is better off because of the Love Your Neighbor Life Skills Program and the different types of support they are able to offer.”
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