When Jennifer Parker got an email Tuesday morning from her church, Catonsville United Methodist, asking for donations of food, clothes and other supplies to send to residents of West Baltimore, she immediately forwarded the message to anyone she could think of.
"I sent it to my car mechanic, who's giving me a bag, my hair dresser — she's also giving me some stuff," she said. "Everybody wants to help."
By Tuesday afternoon, several people had contacted her, telling her they would be stopping by after work with boxes and bags of toiletries, canned food, diapers and other goods.
The church on Melvin Avenue, along with several others in the Baltimore-Washington conference of United Methodist churches, collected the supplies from Tuesday morning until Thursday morning, when a group of volunteers and Rev. Mark Waddell loaded the supplies in a van lent to the church by a congregant and headed for North Avenue in the city.
The supplies, which included virtually anything you would regularly purchase at a grocery store or convenience store, were destined for residents of the West Baltimore neighborhoods worst hit by looting and vandalism last week after the death of Freddie Gray, who had been in police custody.
The response, Waddell said, was astounding.
"I think there was a general sense of wanting to do more than just praying," he said.
In addition to the donated items, the church also used money from its benevolence fund — money reserved to help local people in need of assistance — to purchase even more supplies.
On Thursday, Waddell was pleased to see how much the church had collected.
"It's more than I expected in the short amount of time we had to collect it," Waddell said. "We really didn't have a Sunday that we announced. We have kind of an email [list] and it's on our website, but not everybody reads the website or looks at their emails.
"This is really for those neighborhood people that don't have a place to get these items or they might be older folks that are scared to come out and go shopping or people that, for whatever reason, don't have funds right now, like the people that worked at the CVS and who don't have a job right at the moment," he said.
After the van was loaded, congregants Bill Mengers and Owen Crabb drove to John Wesley United Methodist Church on North Avenue and Hilton Street, one of three designated drop-off sites. There, they met up with John Wesley congregants and other volunteers from around the Baltimore-Washington area, all of whom helped unload the cargo and organize it inside the church for distribution.
The drive was organized by the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church. On Tuesday, conference leaders sent out a call to action to all of its member churches, asking that they collect non-perishable food items and other necessities to send to West Baltimore residents. John Wesley UMC, which is just a few blocks from the CVS that was burned during a riot on April 27, along with Ames UMC and Metropolitan UMC were selected as distribution centers.
"We've been working on that since Day one [of the unrest]," Rev. Joan Carter-Rimbach said of the drive.
United Methodist churches from all over the state wanted to get involved in restoring the city's western neighborhoods, she said. Local churches were encouraged to bring the items they collected to the distribution sites, but congregations in Eastern and Western Maryland were invited to participate, too, by dropping off donations at designated locations, where they would then be transported to West Baltimore.
"We have churches from east, west, north and south," Carter-Rimbach said. "All of our churches have been involved in one way or another."
The church is also offering volunteer-operated rides for West Baltimore residents who need help getting to a store farther from their neighborhood.
Carter-Rimbach said the UMC knows the need will continue long past when the attention has shifted away from Sandtown-Winchester and Mondawmin.
"Just because the unrest has died down doesn't mean that we're going to disappear," she said. "It's going to take a while, and we're going to be there."
John Wesley associate pastor Rev. Twanda Priolea said she was grateful for the church. Another truckload of donations came in at 4 p.m., and neighborhood residents cleaned out the supplies by the end of the day, she said.
"Right around the corner from us is where we had the grocery store and the Rite Aid store, and both of them are boarded up now," she said.
Prioleau said helping residents in need is nothing new to John Wesley UMC.
"We get that all the time," she said. "The need just became greater because of this."
Said CUMC's Waddell: "[I] hope that, more than anything, it will be a witness to the city that, even though we might be a suburb of Baltimore, we still feel a part of what's going on."