To view Photo Galleries of Common Cup Activities Click Here
John Fristoe (Newsletter Editor)
Last week Ruthanne Lamb organized volunteers from the Common Cup churches to come together to prepare and serve a meal at St. Paul UMC.
There were members from Faith Community, Union & Spring Valley churches and there have been other Common Cup churches in the past.
To view photos of some happy people working, click HERE.
The spark plug for this mission work is Ruthanne Lamb who has stayed involved with the Tuesday lunches at St. Paul - even though she is no longer the staff person coordinating the lunch program.
After hearing some of the stories about Ruthanne, I decided to ask St. Paul's Joan Johnson to give me a rundown on some of Ruthanne's good deeds.
Without a tape recorder, I was not prepared for the plethora of her volunteer work. But here are a few:
Ruthanne became coordinator of St. Paul's Tuesday lunch program in the late 1990's where they serve 125-150 hungry and the homeless each week. She acted as hostess in welcoming and orienting the weekly church groups while overseeing the little details which make the lunch run smoothly. She has recently turned the job over to Don Beebe, the present coordinator. I'm guessing she has seen upward to a million meals served during her tenure.
But that's not all at St. Paul. In the past, she has volunteered with the Young Peacemaker's Club's after school program. She has led the children in making school kits for UMCOR and making blankets for children who were Katrina victims - to name a few.
One of the major projects at St Paul was when she and husband, Bill, gave more than a month of their time to convert the food pantry at St. Paul from a traditional pantry to a "choice" pantry. This meant sorting and clearing out a lot of food, rearranging the entire pantry, and designing a new system of operation. So, instead of the needy person, requesting food, having to wait for a staff member to select and bag their food, the requesting person can now walk through the pantry and make choices within the category and family size limits. This gives the "customers" a new feeling of dignity and responsibility.
But St. Paul is just one stop along the way for Ruthanne. Before St. Paul, she coordinated the Fairborn FISH food pantry - and, because they had no building, she did it out of the basement of her home.
She has been a long time active trustee of the Miami Valley United Methodist Mission Society. She volunteered extensively at Parkside Ministries and assisted their transition to ACT at Parkside.
Her passion of late is the Henderson Settlement in southeastern Kentucky and an arm of the Redbird Mission. She has been organizing groups of volunteers from the Common Cup churches to go down and take part in Henderson's work projects. Not only do she and Bill go along but they are there for months at a time.
Still, she and Bill have time to work in the Common Cup Food Court on Wednesday nights.
St. Paul's former minister, Rev. Beth Holton, wrote this about Ruthanne:
"Ruthanne Lamb is a committed Christian whose life has exemplified Christ's mandate to 'feed my sheep'. She is the finest example of a servant leader that I have come in contact with during all my years in urban ministry work. Ruthanne gives new meaning to the word volunteer in her dedication, professionalism and integrity."
And I might add that she does all this with that great big smile!
