ST JOHNS CONFERENCE of SVDP

Our goals are
1) Provide for each family that seeks our services a generous offering of food and other household needed items
2) Supplement our food pantry services with backpacks for kides identified and needing more food to keep from going hungry when schools are not in session
3) Provide fellowship and comfort to the homebound, hospitalized and nursing home patrons from the local Catholic Churches
4) Maintain the N 6th Street Catholic (Pioneer) Cemetery since there is no entity in existence for this propetial care

We will need to step up our charitable gifting programs by adding Guidestar, Facebook, Twitter and other up to date social media platforms to our traditional local program and food drives. In the next 10 years we will need to expand our efforts to maintain our volunteer group. This means finding more assistive devices to help our aging volunteer do their jobs with less physical stress and recruiting new members. We have recently found additional storage space for the backpack program.

Our local Catholic Church Community has 2000 household and here are many other local churches looking for opportunities to volunteer. The addition of our social media campaign is just beginning and we hope this is effective in helping us find donors with a heart toward he poor and homeless.

We haven't reached some of the kids that need our backpack program. This is in part because it is new and in part because the schools haven't "found the time" to get it started. This to us means there is a value factor that hasn't occurred yet in those schools. In the schools we are providing the food we are hearing accolades for our efforts.
SVDP needs to recruit young volunteers and will likely need to go outside our traditional group to find these needed recruits.
There is a serious lack o shelter in our community and we need to work with other social services groups to master this issue.