It’s the morning after a food drive and volunteers and staff at Community Action Southold Town headquarters in Greenport are hard at work. Boxes, bags and crates full of food donated over the weekend are piled high, all of it waiting to be sorted, packaged and stored.
CAST has just moved to 316 Front Street — diagonally across from its old location — and is still scrambling to settle into its new office in time for Sunday’s open house and ribbon-cutting. A lack of parking forced the move; the new location offers seven parking spaces and more storage room than the old headquarters.
Amidst the bustle, volunteer Jackie Wolfson is wrangling an enormous bag of bagels, repacking them into smaller portions for clients to take home. Jackie has been volunteering for two years, at least three mornings a week and sometimes more.
“If they need me, I come in,” she says. “I’ll do anything. Put away food, take phone calls, help with the administrative work. I do this to give back to the community.”
At CAST, everyone pitches in to help when help is needed. Executive director Linda Ruland has just arrived back from a food run to Riverhead. A former elementary reading teacher and director of the North Fork Early Learning Center, Ruland has been the director for the past two years.
A friendly woman with a warm and welcoming smile, Ruland pushes papers and boxes aside to make room in her office to sit down.
“Sorry about the confusion,” she says. “We’ve tried to get everybody else settled, but not me, I’m not settled yet.”
Ruland is excited about the upcoming open house. “We want to get the word out to everyone that we’ve moved. And we want to be recognized in the community by both people in need and people who want to help.”
In its 51st year, CAST was created to help low-income residents in the areas of nutrition, education, energy and employment. It has become a safety net for families throughout the North Fork.
CAST relies heavily on donations from the public and a variety of fundraising events throughout the year.
“We’ve hosted fundraising dinners, gotten donations from the Designer House tour in Cutchogue for the last two years; we also had a triathalon down in the Bayview area in 2014 which netted $10,000. We’re struggling a little now for donations. We’ve done a letter writing campaign recently.”
Hardly discouraged, Ruland is quick to mention some of the creative ways people have devised to raise money for CAST.
“It’s awesome, actually,” she says. “People will call us up out of the blue. Jake Rose, a college student, created and sold a Greenport coloring book and donated $2,500 to CAST. Eleven-year-old Victoria Witczak from Cutchogue grew vegetables all summer and brought them to us. There are lots of ways to help.”
At the back of the building food pantry manager Colleen Cummings is busy trying to organize all the boxes and cans of food. In addition to CAST-run food drives, local groups hold their own drives and bring in donations.
“A lot of the churches do drives and drop food off,” says Cummings. “Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Southold Rotary, they all help out by doing food drives. Southold Rotary also does turkey drives; there’s one coming up soon. Last year we gave 170 families turkey baskets. This year we’re hoping to do even more.”
In addition to the food pantry and other services, CAST provides support through the North Fork Parent-Child Home Program which is an early literacy parent support program done in the home.
“It’s home visiting for low-income families that are raising children ages two to four before they go to school,” explains coordinator Sarah Benjamin. “We give them brand new books and toys and help the parents become their most important teachers. We have bilingual home visitors who stay with the family for two years —the same home visitor,” she said. “This is our fourth year working on the North Fork. It’s a wonderful program and its success has been well documented. Children who are in this program for two years start school eager to learn and on par with more advantaged children and they graduate from high school at a higher level.”
The CAST open house will be held Sunday, Oct. 16 from 2 to 4 p.m. at 316 Front Street in Greenport.
Donations are welcome.
Clients can visit CAST on Mondays and Fridays, 9 a.m. -12 noon and Tuesdays 3-5 p.m. twice a month.
SoutholdLOCAL photos by Katharine Schroeder
