An outreach ministry of Triumph Church in Vicksburg is ensuring some residents and their families do not go hungry.

On the first Wednesday of each month, the Triumph Food Pantry provides local residents with two shopping bags of food for their families at the church at 136 Honeysuckle Lane.

“We’re trying to help people with food insecurities,” the Rev. Mike Fields, Triumph’s pastor, said. “There are a lot of people that don’t have adequate food and especially nutritional food. This stuff (food), I’m not saying it all comes from a health store but everything in those bags is healthy. It’s good meat, chicken; good staples. You’ll see a lot of things like rice and potatoes. We’re serving 300 families.”

Fields said Triumph has had a food pantry since the late 1990s.

“It probably started around 1996, ’97,” he said. “It was actually my grandmother who led the food pantry and kind of founded it. She was a member of the church and it was called ‘Feed My Sheep.’ She kind of oversaw it and rallied volunteers for it.”

At the time, Fields said, the church worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Volunteers would go pick up food and take it to the church, “and then we would have a certain day of the week that people would come to pick it up and we would bag it and process it.”

After his grandmother died, Fields said the church lost its connection with the USDA but continued to buy food and keep it for emergency use for several years.

“The food pantry was still there and everybody knew we had one; we would just go buy food,” he said. “We just allotted money out of the church budget every month for benevolence and we would buy lots of canned goods and things like that, and help people that were in emergency situations.”

Approximately three years ago, Fields said, the church teamed with the Mississippi Food Network to supply food for the pantry.

“We kind of went all-in again,” he said, adding the program has developed to the point where the church could have as many as about 40 or 50 volunteers that work every month processing and bringing food into the pantry.

“Carolyn Cole is our food pantry director and she really makes it work,” Fields said.

The food is picked up in Jackson twice a month and brought to the pantry where volunteers unpack it and re-bag the food to give people a mixture of meat and staples.

To receive groceries, people register at the church office from 9 a.m. to 4 p. m. Tuesday through Thursday and from 9 a.m. to noon on Friday.

The Mississippi Food Network requires that a family fill out an application with their name, address and the number of people in their household once a year.

“We always have at least two bags of groceries (per family),” Fields said. “Every first Wednesday of the month, we have what we call our distribution day. They (recipients) come we’ll have well over a hundred and something cars, lined up here in the driveway in the parking lot and we just have them come through a line. We have a pull-through, and as they pull through the line we identify who they are and they’re on our list of pickups and then we’ve just put the groceries in their car. They don’t have to get out and do anything.”

Fields said the process works well and there are a lot of volunteers working with distribution.

If people are unable to get to the church on distribution day, they can call and make an appointment and pick up their groceries at a certain time and church members can make sure everyone who’s signed up gets their food for the month.

“Then we also have what we call an emergency section of our pantry and that’s where we keep foods that are microwavable,” he said. “We get a lot of transient people to come by and people living in hotels and things like that, and all they’ve got is a microwave. So we’ve got a lot of canned goods and stuff that can be popped in the microwave. We call that our emergency side and we give that to people who come to us or who someone sends here and they have nothing. They’re hungry; they need something to eat.”

Fields said volunteers pack a food box for people in immediate need because most of them are homeless or living in a hotel somewhere.

“They couldn’t cook the other stuff we give out because they have no way to process it; that’s kind of a general idea of what we do,” he said.

Fields said the program’s original name, Feed My Sheep has been changed to Triumph Food Pantry because people tend to identify the pantry with the church.

He said the program expanding.

“We are getting ready, probably within the next 30 days, to pour the foundation for a new building; we’re going to double the size of our pantry,” he said.

Fields said the church now has a 20-by-40 building on the campus and will attach a new, similar-size building to it, “So we’re doubling the size of our pantry so that we’re going to have the capacity to double the volume of people we’re serving.”

One of the reasons for enlarging the pantry, he said, is to have a processing area in the new building to accept more fresh vegetables to be washed and processed — reducing big bundles into smaller ones for distribution.

“We’re talking about fresh grown stuff; we’re talking about good, healthy stuff again. I think what we’re giving out definitely leans toward the healthier side of eating than a lot of people are eating,” he said.

And Fields said the number of food pantry recipients is expanding.

“Every month, we get a few new signups, you know, sometimes two or three, sometimes five or six or seven,” he said. “It just grows by word of mouth and we just recently added a Facebook page, so we’re kind of expecting that that will attract more attention, and as we build that new building, you know, word gets out about that (and) people will continue to sign up. But I would definitely say that we get a few new signups every month.”