Serve

Outreach Ministries and Partnerships

Grace Church seeks to nurture people in body as well as soul.

CAMDEN Christmas

Each Year we support a party on the Epiphany, 3 Kings Day or Día de los Reyes Magos, in Camden. The event is the culmination of the work to get presents to young children in Camden, NJ. It starts in early December as the group gets children to visit St. Nicholas and tell him what they want, then collecting donations, shopping for and wrapping the gifts in preparation for the ‘big day.

Click here to view a video of Camden Christmas January, 2024

Wawa Team

Did you know? – we have a Food Rescue Program? A team of faithful Grace members are picking up surplus sandwiches and pastries from 5 Wawa stores (Cherry Hill, Magnolia, Audubon, Collingswood, and Haddon Township). We are assigned these by the Food Donation Connection.

Each weekday, our team picks up the food from our assigned Wawa stores and brings the food back to Grace and stores it is our freezer. Other team members deliver the stored food to ministries which support those who are food insecure in Camden, to St. Paul’s, St. Wilfrid’s, Heart of Camden and Joseph’s House. Each trip (a pickup or a delivery) is set to take no more than an hour. We also do volunteer administration and food collection reporting.

In 2022 our team of volunteers collected and delivered 28,400 pieces of food. (To find out more, or be part of this team, please contact Al Schmidt.)

St. Paul’s Food Basket

Grace Church has been supporting a food pantry, located at St. Paul's in Camden for over 38 years. A grocery distribution is prepared monthly, offering bags with canned food, etc. (for families with cooking facilities) and bags with “no cans” (for the homeless).

It takes about 10 cans of food and other packaged food items to fill each family bag for handing out. It takes about 20 different snack foods for each homeless bag that we give out.

The Food Bank of South Jersey offers a limited and unpredictable assortment of free food. As a result, we must go to other resources to make up the difference.

To obtain enough food to fill the bags, our parishioners have been very generous in bringing to the Parish House rear doors (PATCO side):

Your generous cash donations have allowed us to buy the remaining food items from places like Aldi's and BJs.

If you would like to help with distribution on 4th Sundays, or if you can help with bag-packing in the week prior, please contact Denise Sikorski (t42wthme@gmail.com), Bill Irving (william.a.irving@gmail.com) or Al Schmidt (al.schmidt@verizon.net)

Project Interaction

Project Interaction is a group of Episcopalians representing seven suburban churches that provide outreach activities at St. Paul’s Church in Camden. Grace Church, as a member, cooks breakfast and provides PBJ sandwiches (via ECW/St. Anne’s Guild) on the first Sunday of the even months. (Other Grace Church members cook breakfast on other Sundays representing their previous Churches.)

Open Door Clinic at St. Wilfrid’s

St. Wilfrid's Open Door Clinic is a collaboration of churches and caring individuals who support this network based at St. Wilfrid's, Camden. During the Covid pandemic, this program shifted focus from a monthly open-door clinic responding to a variety of social needs to a bi-weekly distribution of food and other essentials.

In partnership with St. Paul’s Food Basket, St. Wilfrid's is now a second distribution site registered through Grace with the SJ food bank system. This allows greater flexibility and impact in how and where we can notice and respond to critical needs.

To obtain enough items, our parishioners have been very generous in bringing donations to the Parish House rear doors (PATCO side).

Our reach?
The Open Door Clinic seasonally distributes bookbags with supplies for students, fans, used air conditioners, and Christmas packages of toys. We distributed hundreds of winter jackets, gloves and hats. We also make and distribute peanut and jelly sandwiches.

Supporting Grace’s Outreach Efforts

Click below to learn more: