Harriet Sanders
Photo: Erik Wilson
For the past 20 years, Harriet Sanders has fed the men, women and children who have walked through the doors of Resurrection Baptist Church, a soup kitchen and food pantry in West Philadelphia. Every month, she and other volunteers serve 500 meals and distribute 125 bags of food.
“My mother, Lillian Carter, started this program in 1987 with another woman named Nellie Goodman. My mother worked for the Philadelphia school district as a lunch lady. She was orphaned at an early age, and she couldn’t stand for anyone to be hungry. She used to say that if people had enough to eat, they wouldn’t shoot or steal or kill. So my mother did what she did because she wanted to make the community safer.
I was working for the state back then and I lived in Jersey, but I drove her wherever she needed to go—to pick up food, to attend hunger advocacy meetings in Harrisburg. She worked till the day she died at age 84. This program was everything to her.
When I retired, doing this was the last thing on mind. I promised I would help, but I didn’t know it would become my life’s work. But you get caught up in the people and the families that you serve. They become your families. You empathize with strangers. You go on vacation, and you get a call that someone is knocking on our door and needs food. It’s not something you just turn on and off.
Every time you sit down for a meal, you think about these people. Whether the food in front of you tastes good or not, you can’t complain, because you have a meal, and you’re not concerned about someone taking it away from you.
I’m here at the program about four days a week. When I’m not picking up food, I attend workshops on anything that will further my knowledge of how to help people improve their situation.
A lot of people think we get paid for what we do. I let everyone know that there is not a soul in here that gets paid. A lot of times we go into our own pockets to run this program. How we get paid is by doing something for someone else. ”