2026 Schuylkill County Celebration of Community & Hope
Helping Harvest Fresh Food Bank held its 3rd annual Celebration of Community and Hope in Schuylkill County on April 30, 2026 at Mountain Valley Golf Course in Barnesville.
The event raised funds for Helping Harvest in support of its mission to provide nutritious food to people facing hunger in our communities. Sponsors included AdviseMint Financial, Mountain Valley Golf Course, Mrs. T’s Pierogies, Jack Rich, Inc., AmeriHealth Caritas and over 20 additional area business sponsors.
Jay Worrall, Helping Harvest President
Speakers included Jay Worrall, President, Helping Harvest; Jeanne Boyer Porter, Chair, Helping Harvest Board of Directors; Jeanette Triano Sinn, Executive Director, Servants to All; and Reverend Craig Zimmerman, Saint Paul’s UCC in Ringtown, who provided the invocation.
The program included messages on the impact of the Helping Harvest Community Kitchen, opened in downtown Reading in April 2025 (which has since produced and distributed over 30,000 nutritious heat-and-eat ready meals to Schuylkill County residents (largely seniors), and a tribute to Helping Harvest’s dedicated volunteers and staff.
Triano Sinn spoke from the perspective of a Helping Harvest partner agency, and she noted that Servants to All would not be able to support individuals facing homelessness in Schuylkill County the way that they do without Helping Harvest’s support.
In his speech, Worrall cited many exciting accomplishments for Helping Harvest over the past year, including the opening of the Helping Harvest Community Kitchen almost exactly one year ago. The Kitchen takes bulk food packaged for the hospitality industry and turns it into nutritious heat-and-eat ready meals with the help of three professional chefs. The bulk foods are also repackaged into family-friendly portions. Volunteers help prepare and package the meals and food, and the finished products are distributed through Helping Harvest’s network of partners or programs like Mobile Markets.
Worrall said, “To be completely honest with you, I have never been a part of a project that so completely exceeded our ambition. We first completed 2,500 meals in a week in August of 2025, nine months ahead of schedule. We surpassed 100,000 meals in just our 10th month. Rather than recruiting seven or eight volunteers, we regularly see more than 20 each day.”
Jeanette Triano Sinn, Servants to All
He added that in addition to the work of the Kitchen, Helping Harvest has seen many other areas of growth over the past year. The food bank distributed nearly 3 million pounds of food valued at $5.7 million in Schuylkill County last year—a new record. That food is distributed to people facing food insecurity at over 100 distribution locations in Schuylkill County, mainly churches, senior high rises and schools.
Worrall closed with a message of thanks for supporters, and words of hope, saying, “Because of your commitment, children in Schuylkill County will go to bed tonight with full bellies rather than going hungry. Because of your generosity, grandparents are not forced to choose between buying medicine or buying food. Because of your kindness, toddlers are entering preschool healthy and prepared to learn. Hunger is a solvable problem. It really is. Let’s work to make sure no child, no parent, no senior—no one—goes hungry in our community. Together we can end hunger in Schuylkill County.”
Helping Harvest, the leading provider of food to families in Schuylkill County, has provided services to the county for four decades. Last year, Helping Harvest supplied over $5.7 million (2.8 million lbs.) of nutritious food to Schuylkill County charitable food programs. The Senior Food Box Program distributed almost 229k lbs. of food to lower-income seniors at 42 sites in Schuylkill County. The Weekender Program, which provides a bag of easy-to-prepare meals and snacks for students experiencing food insecurity to eat over the weekend, distributed almost 52K bags at 19 sites in Schuylkill County.
Check out more photos from the event.
