The History of

Community Resource Day

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“Community Resource Day”

 

CRD DEVELOPMENT

Our Tabernacle Basic Blessings program that began in 2017 was helping Lower Township families with monthly distributions… think food bank but sanitary products, baby supplies, cleaning needs, and other items that Medicare didn’t cover. 

 

In many cases, we found that people who were benefiting from the TBB program had additional needs that were not being met. We didn’t have the knowledge base to point them in the proper direction, so we contacted Cape May County Human Services to fill us in on how they could be helped.

 

We came away from this meeting feeling led to invite other non-profit social service providers, such as ourselves, to join in a daylong event/open house devoted to increasing awareness of the services that were available to the community within southern Cape May County.

 

THEN GOD TOOK OVER

Through much behind the scenes work and planning, plus a lot of prayer, the first Community Resource Day was held in February 2023 with 44 area organizations offering their services to residents under the Michael Hall roof!  CRD 2024 hosted 77 organizations.  Jumping ahead to February 2025, CRD was packed with 84 organizations set up and ready to aid the people of our community. 

 

For CRD 2026 we had 96 service organizations on Tabernacle's campus to share the assistance they offer to families in need.  CRD 2026  included a Veterans Annex in our Sanctuary Lower Level for Governmental and private Veterans organizations and those organizations that support them.   This was done to increase the focus on support for Veterans in our community and to also provide space for private discussions between the organizations and the Veterans when appropriate.  

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CRD2027 is in the late planning stages at this time.  We've expanded the area in the lower Sanctuary so we can provide 95 tables for organizations between Michael Hall and the Sanctuary Lower Level with the capability to host 110 organizations with the normal level of table sharing.  To handle the increased workload Cape Assist / Lower Township Healthy Youth Coalition will be providing an online registration system for our use, as well as volunteers to handle the increased effort required.

 

OUR MISSION

Our mission at Tabernacle has always been to meet the needs of our neighbors' both spiritually & practically!  With today’s economy, families are struggling more than ever to provide the basics. Tabernacle Basic Blessings in addition to the services available at Community Resource Day are helping to meet these needs!

 

COMMUNITY EDUCATION

Tabernacle also offers regularly scheduled Speaker Events on topics that are of interest to the community.  Our Director of Outreach has developed a Community Social Service focused website where information is shared about what’s going on in our community. We will continue to work to identify as many service organizations in our community as we can to make it easier for our neighbors to get the help they need. 

 

One of the unexpected takeaways from this first event in 2023 was that it turned out to be a great networking opportunity for the organizations to get to know each other better and start taking small steps to collaborate with other organizations with similar missions.

 

If you would like to share in our mission, come speak at Tabernacle, join us at Community Resource Day, or just get more information about Tabernacle and it's outreach activities please contact our Director of Outreach, Steve Bistak at 732-850-5453, or email bistaksp@gmail.com.

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