Master Provisions Food and Clothing Sorting

            Our recent trips to the Master Provisions warehouse were incredibly successful. We assisted on multiple Tuesdays as part of Master Provisions’ Student Serve Day series and on Saturday for the 2nd Saturday Pack. This is an easy and rewarding opportunity for students to volunteer during the school year. I started working with Master Provisions because they are easy to work with and encourage teen leadership instead of making students feel inferior.  Plus, the work we do here goes to benefit people across the world and in our own community through the Isaiah House mission, which provides food once a month to needy families.
        Master Provisions provides food, clothing, and orphan care to our local community as well as in countries around the world. With only five full time employees, they rely heavily on assistance from volunteers. This dependency necessitates their accommodation for volunteers of all ages and abilities.

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On our first day, ten of us worked on their shoe collection. We went through all of the shoes that had been donated, matching and making pairs. Our second trip consisted of sorting clothes and packing them into “winter” and “summer” bags. The summer bags go to Honduras; the winter bags go to Kosovo, Africa. We learned the importance of detailed sorting: recycling unsatisfactory clothing is imperative to the sorting process. Additionally, wearing shorts in Honduras is associated with gang behavior, so eliminating shorts was also important. In total, we packed nearly 140 bags of clothing for distribution, which works out to nearly 5,000 people helped.     -John Taylor

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