The Community Dining Room celebrated its 25th year of service! From its inception, the CDR's mission has been to provide nutritional food support, referral services and volunteer opportunities to the Branford and shoreline communities.
This past fall, the Community Dining Room received a $5,000 grant from the Branford Community Foundation. These funds were especially important due to the challenging economic times. With increasing unemployment, family budgets are being stretched beyond their limits. Parents and individuals began coming to the CDR in search of social services information and assistance. Clearly, the need for support has moved into the middle-class sector of our society. Hard-working families are now in need of food support to help them save precious dollars to pay for utilities, housing bills and increasing grocery costs.
Food in the refrigerator for after-school snacks or a family dinner can help a great deal in a weekly budget. Identifying this need, the CDR began a new program for individuals and families who have lost their jobs: Wednesday Night Take Out. This program provides quality meals for families who cannot come to the CDR daily lunch program and struggle to feed their children and keep them healthy. Branford Community Foundation dollars have directly helped fund this program, which provides about 75 dinners each Wednesday.
Our Tuesday Family Dinner brings families together to share a meal and educational experiences. Working with Read to Grow and other educational groups, Tuesday dinners include story hour, free book distribution, crafts experiences and cultural nights. Combined with a good, nutritious dinner children are healthy, well fed and ready to learn. Parents stretch their food budgets with the help of this program, serving approximately 50 dinners each week.
CDR programs include daily lunch, Saturday breakfast, Tuesday Family Dinner, home delivery and our Wednesday Night Take Out. We also provide community service opportunities for youth and vocational training for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The Community Dining Room is an important part of the Branford social service network, helping assure a quality standard of living for all our neighbors. |
