The Pantry Of Oxford & Lafayette County

Community Church and community. Sound like a good match? It is! This month the Community Church is giving their time and labor to the Pantry, serving their neighbors with energy and good cheer. They are a great group, and a gift to all. Thank you, Community church folks! This past Wednesday they had a hand from athletes of the Ole Miss Women's and Men's basketball teams. We were all most grateful for their help and cheerful spirit! Swish!

To all Oxford Pantry clients, the Pantry is open today, July 4th, from 9 to 11 AM as usual.

Send a message to learn more

To all Pantry clients, the Pantry is open today, July 4th, as usual, between 9 and 11 AM.

Send a message to learn more

Talk about generating power! Northeast Mississippi Electric Power Association has donated $5000 to the Pantry of Oxford and Lafayette County. All at the Pantry are most thankful for this clear sign of care and community involvement. Thank you, NE Power! Here are Sarah Brooke Bishop and Brittany Hill from NE Power, with Guthrie Abbott and Monte Ochs gratefully accepting their generous donation!

Nobody works more cheerfully than Pantry volunteers! This past month, the Pantry has had the willing and efficient hands of folks from St. Peter's Episcopal Church serving the community. They, with University students and regular volunteers, distributed food to hundreds of families. The food they distributes is the direct result of the Oxford/Lafayette community's faithful and generous support. Thank you!

The Pantry expansion has been a blessing to everyone, volunteers and clients alike. The community is most grateful to all the generous donors who made the expansion possible, and allowed us to serve more and better!
Missing from this list are Taddy and WIll Pepper, to whom apologies and sincere thanks!

March of the Mayors

Fifty Mayors from Five Mississippi Regions; North MS, the Delta, Jackson Metro, the Pinebelt, and the Coast, teamed up to collect food for Mississippians in need.

Oxford’s Mayor Robyn Tannehill was one of the seven Mayors across the North Mississippi Region who took the challenge to donate canned food items for this annual ExtraTable Foundation (Hattiesburg) event. On March 5th the north MS donations were delivered to Tupelo Furniture Market by city employee groups and everyone worked together to build individual food boxes. These food boxes were evenly divided and returned to their hometown to benefit local partner food pantries.

The Oxford Food Pantry is greatly appreciative to Mayor Tannehill & the City employees who joined in this Mayor’s Challenge. Their efforts provided these food boxes for this week’s Pantry clients.

The City of Oxford was represented on this trip to Tupelo by Marlee Carpenter & Micah Uline of Stronger Together Oxford and Whitney Blanchard & Desmond Mayes of Oxford Building & Grounds.

Thank you Mayor and your awesome employees for their support.

After a five year hiatus, the annual Oxford Food Pantry Empty Bowls Luncheon returned to the Conference Center on Thursday, February 15th. It was a fabulous affair with a large turnout from the Community and an impressive number of Civic and Church leadership as volunteers. This annual event featured 27 locally renown soups and over 2,000 unique ceramic bowls.

Special thanks to Monte and Marianna Ochs for gathering the donated ceramic bowls. This was a year long effort. These bowls came from numerous potters both local and throughout Alabama and Mississippi. Bowls were also provided by Lafayette & Oxford High School and Ole Miss.

Special thanks to our Event Coordinator Dorothy Lorenzo and all the folks who recruited and gathered the signature soups from so many of our local chefs and restaurants. Many long time Pantry supporters and our local clergy helped serve soup to over 850 people and provided 150 preordered and prepaid carry out meals.

Also thanks to Milo’s and Nothing Bundt Cakes for their donation of drinks and dessert.

Again thank you to the Oxford and Lafayette Community for your support for our efforts to feed those in need.

Please note: The announcement in Invitation magazine says that Empty Bowls will be on Wednesday February 15th. The correct day is THURSDAY February 15th!!!

The Pantry's most important and popular fundraising event is back! Empty Bowls will be at the Conference Center on Thursday, February 15th, from 11 to 1 PM, offering a handmade bowl to take home, a choice of many gourmet soups from area restaurants, caterers and wonderful cooks, water, bread and dessert, all for $25! All proceeds go to the Oxford Lafayette Food Pantry for the purchase of food to share with our neighbors. Please join us!

Due to hazardous travel conditions, the Pantry will be closed this week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, January 16, 17 and 18, out of concern for the safety of both clients and volunteers. We will reopen next week.

More of the elegant bowls made and donated by residents of Beau Ridge for Empty Bowls, which returns to Oxford on February 15th, at the Conference Center.

The Pantry runs on help from the community. Everyone who works there is a volunteer - no one gets paid. Every penny we receive goes to the purchase of food, and to the maintenance of the Pantry building. It's easy to donate- we have a Paypal account, [email protected], or you may use this QR code, which if you focus your phone's camera on it, will lead you directly to a site where you may contribute. The Pantry needs you. If you don't need us, great! Maybe you'd like to help someone who does! Thanks!

The Oxford Food Pantry has been extremely blessed with exceptional Community support during this holiday season.

The number of school and civic club donations are too many to list them all but many were just too generous and require recognition:
Mississippi Baptist Hospital Staff - 10,000 cans of green beans, corn, and soup
W. G. Yates Construction - 6,000 cans of green beans and corn
Oxford Middle School - 1,000 cans of assorted vegetables and soup
Central Elementary School - 800 cans of assorted vegetables and soup
LHS Beta Club - 600 cans of assorted vegetables and soup
Mississippi Society of CPAs - 700 cans of assorted vegetables and dry goods
Oxford Night Owls Motorcycle Club - 600 assorted cans and dry goods
ExtraTable Foundation, Hatiesburg - 150 frozen chickens
Rebel Rags - 2,000 plastic bags
Dream Team Staffing, Southaven - 400 boxes of Cereal

Our food distribution to those in need continues to grow, with 713 families served in November and 640 families in December.

Special thanks to ALL our recurrent food and financial donors. Our support to those in need would be lacking without you.

God Bless You for your support throughout 2023. We look forward to your continued participation and involvement in 2024.

Thank you, Oxford-Lafayette community for hearing our request for plastic bags! Once again you have responded to us in abundance! We are good for plastic bags for now, and we are so happy to know that our voice is heard on FB! You're the best!

The Pantry has the best gift selection in Oxford! For a $10 donation, we can provide you with the gift of food for those in need, for everyone on your list! You can pick up these lovely Christmas cards at the Pantry on Wednesdays or Thursdays from 9 to 11 AM, or at the Origen Bank at 1713 University Ave. Check off your gift list and help the community. What a combination!

All Pantry friends! We need plastic grocery bags - you know, the ones you are saving to recycle? The Pantry is direly in need of them! We served 751 families last month, and we're OK on food, but down to scraping for bags. If you could drop off extras at the Pantry, either Tuesday ,Wednesday, or Thursday mornings, or you can leave them in the black donation box on the Pantry porch.
Thanks for your continued support of the Pantry!

The Pantry is preparing for our principal fundraiser, Empty Bowls. It will be the first since 2019, and we hope it will be a great success. here is a Save-the-Date reminder ! Bowl-creation is already under way!

This is a reminder to Pantry volunteers and neighbors that the Pantry will be closed Thanksgiving week.

Tuesday November 14th was such a happy day for the Pantry and everyone involved in it! Mayor Robyn Tannehill and Pantry volunteers joined to cut the ribbon on the Pantry renovations. All involved in the Pantry are most grateful to those who made this happen, from donors to architect to contractor to volunteers, all are glad to be able to serve our community better!

October was our second month back in operation and the Oxford Food Pantry served over 590 clients. Our St. John the Evangelist volunteers truly stepped up every day we were open. 10 - 12 parishioners showed up daily sharing hugs and always providing big smiles. The UM Community blessed us with the smiles and help from 8 - 10 Ole Miss students daily as well.

Special thanks to:

Thank you to the weekly volunteers from Beta Alpha Psi, UM Accounting Society
Thank you to the Kappa Sigma fraternity for their 1,500 cans of vegetables, peanut butter, and soup.
Thank you to the Gentiva Hospice staff for their Food Drive which provided 1,000 pounds of canned goods and $200 cash donations.
Thank you to Mr. Phillip Smith and Dream Team Staffing of Memphis. They have donated over 200 boxes of cereal.

As always, thanks for the weekly donations from Oxford Community Market, WalMart, Kroger, Panera Bread, Bost Farm, and our many other food and financial donors.
Thanks to all for your helping those with food insecurity.

The Pantry of Oxford is most grateful to the energetic and cheerful crew from St. John the Evangelist Church who served their neighbors in the month of October! As aklways, the Pantry depends on the service and generosity of the churches of Oxford to be able to carry out the mission of bringing food to those who need it!

Happy Halloween! Join us for the first-ever Witches' ride, benefiting the Pantry. Bring the family to any spot between MidTown shopping center and around the Square on Thursday, October 23rd at 6PM.. see you there, my pretties!

We're so glad to say that the Pantry is back, up and running. The schedule is unchanged, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 9-11 at the building on Molly Barr Rd. We welcome back our neighbors!
We have two requests:
1. We need egg cartons! A kind and generous person is donating eggs. We just need to keep them safe between us and those who receive them!
2. The Pantry needs more volunteers! If you are interested in helping the Pantry in the distribution of food and can give a couple of hours on a Wednesday or Thursday morning, the Pantry needs you. Please call (662) 832-8001

It was hot, but who cared? Once again on August 3rd volunteers distributed food at the temporary Jackson Ave site, hopefully for the last time before the Pantry building expansion is done! People from St. Andrew's United Methodist, Oxford-University Methodist Church, Community Church, as well as folks from Stronger Together Oxford served their neighbors and distributed food to 167 families.
Couldn't happen without volunteers, and in this case, help from the University in the form of tables and tents. We hope next month to be back in the Pantry's regular home on Molly Barr Rd. Meanwhile, many thanks to everyone who brought the Pantry through this Long, Hot Summer!

Thanks to all our volunteers and the wonderful help from UM, our Mobile Food Pantries for June and July went amazingly well, On each day, the Pantry was able to serve more than 250 families. The June Pantry was in the hands of volunteers from First Presbyterian Church, and this week's was served by the Community Church. Both groups braved very hot weather with smiles and good humor to serve their community.
The Community Church group was joined by 10 volunteers from UU Methodist Church, 4 from Stronger Together Oxford, 6 Pantry monthly regulars and a Sing-In crew tending to people at their cars.
The University is providing parking lot access, tables, chairs, traffic cones and signage. Additionally, the UMPD assists with traffic control personnel. Special thanks to Beth Beard, University Event Coordinator and to Castel Sweet, Director of the Center for Community Engagement. These ladies were of invaluable help in our success!