What began during the coronavirus pandemic is now helping people during a time of higher grocery prices. Blessings on the Block, a Harker Heights-based outreach ministry, set up a tent in the parking lot of the former YMCA in north Harker Heights on Saturday to serve those in need.
“We actually started this during the heart of the pandemic, so it was even more needed then,” said Byron Sago, founder of the outreach. “But we just continue to go at it.”
Sago is also pastor of Light of Hope Fellowship Ministry in Harker Heights.
Sago explained the outreach started small but has grown in the last two years.
“We were just distributing these non-perishable food items and bread and things like that,” he said. “And then we started spreading out to Temple. We do work in Killeen as well as Copperas Cove.”
Sago explained that the mobile food pantry allows them to go deeper into neighborhoods and feed people who can’t get to other pantries.
“So we bring the food pantry to them,” he said.
Saturday’s mobile food pantry proved timely for one Harker Heights woman, who said things have been tough lately.
“Stuff like this, it helps the struggling community,” said Nakita Peavy, who lives near where Blessings on the Block Community Outreach set up its mobile food pantry.
“We live month-to-month on checks, so whatever we get, but we don’t provide for our daughters, sometimes we do without.”
It also proved timely because Peavy, the mother of a 1-year-old daughter, received baby food.
She explained that her daughter was on her last jar prior to her going to the mobile food pantry.
“I’m grateful for these folks right here,” she said. “I’m grateful for my friends because I wouldn’t have known about this today,” Peavy said, adding that every little bit helps.
Blessings on the Block also partners with Killeen ISD’s Timber Ridge Elementary and Rancier Middle School with what Sago calls the Brown Box Blessings Program.
“Once a month during the school year, what we do is we take boxes of food to those two schools, and they give them out to the students and the families that need them,” he said.
Blessings on the Block typically operates a mobile food pantry every few months.
Sago said he and some volunteers will be at the Moss Rose Community & Development Center, 1103 E. Avenue E, in Killeen to provide a hot meal from 11 am to 1 pm on Sept. 17
For more information about when and where Blessings on the Block Community Outreach will set up a mobile food pantry, follow the organization on Facebook and Instagram by searching the name.
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