A gift offered, a gift received: Volunteers, patrons reap rewards at Society of St. Vincent de Paul center

Jake Asher, left, takes the time to talk with Jenean Hoskin and her grandson, Daniel, sitting in the shopping cart. As the president of the Indianapolis Council of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Asher supervises the Pratt-Quigley Center which offers free food, medical care and legal assistance to people in need.

By John Shaughnessy

The memory of the boy and the mother still motivates Jake Asher as he walks through the crowd of people who have come for free food, medical care and legal assistance at the Pratt-Quigley Center.

Asher met the boy and his mother when he made a visit to their home in his early years of volunteering for the Indianapolis Council of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

During that visit, the mother told Asher that her son didn’t want to go to school the next day because he was embarrassed that his socks had holes in them. So Asher went to a nearby store, bought the boy three new pairs of socks and marveled at how happy the gift made the child.

“I felt that’s why God sent me on the call,” recalls Asher, now the president of the council. “We’re called to take God’s word to the people and give them hope.”

That simple approach has become the guiding force in the nine months that the Society of St. Vincent de Paul has operated the new, innovative Pratt-Quigley Center that serves more than 2,300 families in need each week. Through the efforts of hundreds of volunteers, the Indianapolis center is helping people at “the lowest levels of poverty,” according to Asher.

“We opened the center in January,” Asher says. “One of our goals is to serve the whole city

with food. The need is astronomical, and it’s getting worse.”

The center has also illuminated the two sides of hope. Sometimes, hope is a gift that’s offered and sometimes it’s a gift that’s received. And no matter what side of the connection people are on, that sense of hope binds them.

That reality became clear on a recent Tuesday, the center’s busiest day of the week, a day when Richard Robbins arrived outside the center at 4:07 in the morning.

The most rewarding part

At 72, Robbins knows the waiting room for the center’s food pantry doesn’t open until 8 a.m. and the food pantry doesn’t open until an hour later. He also knows the food pantry stays open until 3 p.m. on Tuesdays, offering clients the opportunity to choose the food they want from a

selection that includes frozen meats, pasta, canned vegetables, crackers, juices and breads. Still, he always arrives early because he wants to be one of the first in line at the center at 3001 E. 30th St.

“I’ve been here since seven minutes after four, and I’m number seven in line,” he says.

Robbins isn’t complaining. For him, any wait is worth the difference the free food makes for him and his wife, Connie.

“A lot of times, we don’t have the money to go to the store,” Robbins says. “I’m on disability, and she’s on Social Security. This really helps us save to pay utilities, which are so high anymore. We got items we really need—cereal, toilet paper, pretzels, sausage. That should make three meals, depending on how we use it.”

Connie looks behind her at the rows of people pushing shopping carts past the boxes and shelves of food. She sees grandmothers with grandchildren, young mothers with babies, an elderly man hobbling along with a cane, and people who are black, white and Hispanic.

“There’d be a lot of people who would starve if they didn’t have this place,” she says.

As the number of bankruptcies and foreclosures continues to soar in Indiana, Pete Withey has seen an increase in the number of people who need food assistance. He knows that the number of families seeking help at the center has grown from 1,500 to 2,350 in a six-month period. His volunteer job as the center’s procurement coordinator has also expanded.

“It’s an every day, every week job,” says the 62-year-old Withey, who is retired from Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis.

“The number of needy clients has expanded so fast since we opened that we’ve had to expand our search area for food,” he says. “I spend a lot of time on the phone soliciting bulk purchases of food. On meat, about one dollar a pound is as much as we can pay. We use places in Chicago, Kansas City, North Carolina and northern Indiana. We have pork tenderloins that are usually $4.95 to $5.95 a pound that we got for a dollar.”

Withey procures about 75,000 pounds of food a week to distribute to people in need.

“We’re turning this food that most likely would have been thrown away into dollars for these families,” says Withey, a member of St. Monica Parish in Indianapolis. “We save them from $150 to $175 a month, which they can then use to pay for prescriptions, heat or lights. The most rewarding part is just seeing the expressions on their faces and hearing their thanks. It’s the feedback that keeps you going.”

A matter of dignity

While hope is at the heart of the Pratt-Quigley Center, so is the offshoot of hope—dignity.

The idea of clients picking out the food they want was a rare approach in 1999 when the Society of St. Vincent de Paul opened its first large-scale food pantry in Indianapolis at 2111 E. Spann Ave.

Before then, the typical food pantry gave two bags of already-selected food to people, recalls Don Striegel, the pantry’s volunteer coordinator.

“A study showed that in that type of operation, 40 percent of the food will not be used,” says Striegel, a member of St. Jude Parish in Indianapolis. “We let them choose.”

That approach was promoted by the late Bill Quigley, a member of Christ the King Parish in Indianapolis who is honored by

having his name as part of the Pratt-Quigley Center. The other part of the center’s name salutes the Pratt family, which drastically reduced the selling price of the building to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

“Bill Quigley was dedicated to the needy,” Striegel says. “He knew it would be tough to eliminate hunger and poverty, but he sought to alleviate them.”

That desire to offer hope and dignity to the poor has expanded at the new center with the opening of a legal aid center and the Gennesaret Free Clinic. The medical clinic has two exam rooms, a lab and a pharmacy. It’s staffed Tuesday and Saturday mornings by a doctor and nurses. The volunteers help about 20 people a day, dealing with basic concerns that include the flu, fevers, blood pressure and diabetes.

The free legal clinic is also open on Tuesday mornings.

“We deal with a lot of landlord-tenant problems and family law problems like custody and child support,” says Mary Chandler, 46, who volunteers with Stephanie Crossin, 42, a fellow lawyer and fellow

member at St. Luke the Evangelist Parish in Indianapolis. “A woman who came in today has taken care of her grandchildren for 14 years, but she doesn’t have legal custody. The mother is nowhere to be found. The grandmother needs custody to have benefits.”

Getting closer to God

As Asher walks through the center, he stops to talk to one of the shoppers,

45-year-old Jenean Hoskin. Her grandson, Daniel, sits in the shopping cart and smiles at anyone who comes near.

“This is a nice place,” she says. “It helps me feed the family.”

Continuing through the center, Asher notices that more people are using its services than usual on this late September day.

“It’s the end of the month, and their food stamps are gone,” says Asher, 62, a member of Holy Spirit Parish in Indianapolis. “You’re seeing poverty at the lowest level.”

It’s just Tuesday and it’s already been a busy week at the center. On Monday, nearly 200 people with special needs came to the pantry, some lining up in their wheelchairs and others with their oxygen tanks. The pantry volunteers sent them home with twice as much food so they wouldn’t have to return for another two weeks.

On Wednesdays, pantry volunteers make home deliveries to another 200 people in need. At 81, Doris Dimond is part of that volunteer effort, along with her friend and fellow member of St. Luke Parish, 77-year-old Jean Wawrzyniak.

“I’ve done almost every route,” Dimond says. “If a driver doesn’t show up, I’ll call my husband, Bob, and we’ll go out. I love what I do. I’ve made so many deliveries I’ve gotten to know the people. I know they need help. I know I feel as good as I do because I’m here doing this.”

So do the hundreds of people who make the all-volunteer effort work. They staff the Spann Avenue facility on Thursdays. They come back to help at the 30th Street

location on Fridays and Saturdays.

“We depend on the Catholic community to provide us with volunteers,” Asher says. “Eighty percent of our volunteers are Catholic. Fifty to 60 percent of our funding comes from Catholics. Jesus asked us to help the poor, to help the needy. That’s why we’re here.”

Asher and the other volunteers are here to give hope. Still, after 30 years as a volunteer for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Asher knows that giving hope always comes full circle.

“You grow spiritually from doing this,” he says. “That’s why I do it. I feel like I’m getting closer to God because of this.”

(Anyone interested in volunteering or contributing to the Pratt-Quigley Center and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul can call 317-924-5769.) †