Giving Those in Need a Thanksgiving Meal

Local volunteers gathered at Tejas Healthcare in La Grange last Thursday for the annual Thanksgiving basket collection drive.

The project provides food baskets for clients of the Family Crisis Center. The baskets contain everything needed to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving meal. The tradition started at St. Mark’s Medical Center. The hospital organized the collection drive for many years until it closed in October 2023, just before Thanksgiving. Longtime St. Mark’s nurse Laurie Quinta teamed up with Tejas Healthcare to keep the project going.

“We give these baskets along with a smoked turkey or a frozen turkey to families who are signed up,” said Bernie Jackson, assistant executive director of the Family Crisis Center. “These are families who are receiving services of the Family Crisis Center. We are able to feed somewhere between 65 and 95 families with the food that comes from this effort here in Fayette County.”

The volunteers had collected 67 baskets when the Record visited them Thursday morning, and more were still arriving. Local businesses, civic organizations, and private individuals all contributed to the effort.

“The Family Crisis Center is the premier service agency for domestic violence, sexual assault, and now stalking,” Jackson said.

“The majority of these people are in our transitional housing, we have apartments. And then there are also nonresidential, they might have been in a home where they were battered but now they’ve moved into a different home. It’s women and families who have been in domestic violence situations in the last six months.”

Jackson said she wishes the problem of domestic violence would end, but unfortunately, more and more women seek out their services.

“They want to have Thanksgiving like everyone else does,” Jackson said.