Residents of the greater Morgantown area can stop by The Shack Neighborhood House, a local nonprofit organization, to pick up a free dinner between 4:30 and 6 p.m. Friday.
Devon McDaniel, program coordinator at The Shack Neighborhood House, said the organization started providing free lunches to the community last summer after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Free dinners were being offered by The Shack Neighborhood House as of August. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, meals are offered for pick-up in a drive-thru fashion.
“You just drive up to the front door of The Shack and just honk your horn, and then a staff member comes out and asks you how many meals you need and then how many kids you have in your family, because we also give an additional kids’ snack pack with extra snacks in it. Then the staff comes back in, packs up the meal and brings it right out to the car,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel said the menus for free dinners can be found on The Shack Neighborhood House’s official Facebook page the morning of the dinner. Those interested in the menu can also call the organization to find out its contents. The Shack number is 304-599-5466.
Additionally, the organization plans on adding free meal menus to its website soon.
McDaniel said the main goal of the free meal program is to provide relief to community members who might be struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re a community-based center, so we just want to meet the needs of the community. When COVID started, we realized that [meant] kids not being in school and people having a reduction of hours, losing their jobs – it’s just been an overall really stressful time. We wanted to make sure that we could get people nutritious meals that were hot and ready to take, because it’s a full, complete, nutritious meal that they could take home and eat,” McDaniel said.
McDaniel said the other goals of the program are to help maintain a feeling of community in a time of isolation and relieve the stress of cooking a meal after a long day for those who are still working.
“[We want to] meet the needs of the community and help alleviate the financial costs and the stress of it, too,” McDaniel said.
No registration or reservation is necessary to pick up a free meal.
The Shack Neighborhood House can be contacted at 304-599-5466 and is located at 537 Blue Horizon Drive, Pursglove.
For more information on The Shack Neighborhood House, visit www.the-shack.org.
