Truckload of Donated Food Bound for Sherman Pantry Aug. 26

A tractor-trailer of donated food is due at Masterkey Ministries in Sherman on Aug. 26, sent by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with part of the load headed on to other pantries in the area, according to the volunteer project record posted on the church's JustServe site. For families in the country north of the metroplex, the delivery lands in a region where Feeding America's 2024 estimates put roughly one in six people short of the food they need.

The project record lists the work waiting for volunteers: unload the trailer, put together orders for community pantries, then help load those orders for pickup. First-party records name the recipient as Masterkey Ministries. A post from the Sherman Texas Stake says the church is sending the truck for the August project.

How much food is on board, the listing does not say. Two church deliveries in North Texas earlier this year give a sense of the scale: more than 36,000 pounds on May 13, split between Metrocrest Services and Frisco Family Services, and more than 35,000 pounds on Aug. 5 spread across three organizations. The Church News, an official church publication, reported that the church is sending 250 truckloads to food banks this year to mark the country's 250th anniversary, with comparable loads delivered in Boston, Chicago and Kansas City.

Masterkey's food work started small, by the ministry's own account: a North Texas Food Bank snack program in 2011, a community pantry the next year, and in 2014 Sherman's first client-choice pantry, where families pick their own groceries instead of taking a packed box. The ministry says it moved more than a quarter-million pounds that first year and now serves 1,000 to 1,500 families a week, through drive-thru distributions Friday at Harvest Time Church and Saturday at its own building, both from 8 to 10:30 a.m. In 2020, it says, it reached more than 1,800 families, about four times the households it had been serving regularly.

The North Texas Food Bank reported that food insecurity across its 12-county service area rose from the prior year, to 16.8%, and that the rate among children rose to 24.5%. Feeding America's 2024 county estimates put the overall rate higher in Cooke County than in Grayson, and the child rate higher in Grayson than in Cooke, with more than one in four children in each county living in a food-insecure household. Statewide, Feeding America estimates Texas at 19.4%, above the national picture the USDA's Economic Research Service drew for 2024, when 13.7% of American households went without enough food at some point in the year.

Feeding America estimates Cooke County households fall roughly $5 million a year short of what their food costs, and puts the statewide gap in the billions. Pantries on the receiving end of the earlier church deliveries reported higher counts than in past years. Metrocrest Services said it is serving double the families it fed at the height of the pandemic, and Christian Community Action said its weekly count of about 850 families is nearly twice what it was four years ago.