The Christian Center of Park City was able to help local residents celebrate Easter. Meanwhile, the demand is still increasing for their regular programs, such as Basic Needs Assistance and their food pantrys.
Rob Harter, President of the Christian Center, said this year, they weren’t able to give out their normal Easter Baskets. But thanks to a donor, they obtained some pre-packaged Baskets, and gave out 240 of the gifts to children at the Park City Food Pantry, and about 200 at the Heber location.
Meanwhile, Harter said that their Basic Needs Assistance Program got some 520 applicants. But they’re ready to open up the application process again.
“We’re not finished with 520 applications, approximately, is what we had initially. We put it on pause, as I told you last week. We got through a lot of those. We’ve contacted everybody, I should say that. So now we’re just in the process of getting all the documents together and getting those checks out to people. But we feel comfortable enough. We’ve had a tremendous amount of support from the community financially. Many people saw in the Park Record the city is going to give us another $60,000 for this effort. So we feel comfortable in opening that back up to have more people that need help with rent, need help with a utility bill, a power bill, etc.”
Harter said they could get another 2-300 more applicants. But he advised hopefuls to expect it will take two to three weeks for their checks to be processed.
He reminded them the Christian Center will need documentation, in order to send checks directly to a utility company or a landlord.
The Center’s Food Bank served 1000 people last week. It’s open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday to Friday.
Harter said there have also been some improvements in obtaining food from local groceries.
“The grocery stores initially were hit pretty hard, in terms of just a lot of people buying all of their product. There wasn’t much that they gave us. But now we’re back up to normal amounts I would say, from what the grocery stores are giving us. We made a few purchases with Nichols & Company. As a distributing company, they’ve been able to give us, pretty quickly too. So we’ve filled in the gaps with like, extra meat, extra toilet paper, some other things that we weren’t getting from the grocery stores. But we feel pretty good overall that we’re getting a lot of food to people.”
Rob Harter, who said recipients can go online to “CCofPC.org”. You will be notified by the Center of the day and time you can come to the Center’s drive-thru to obtain food.
