Connecting Our Kitchen to Recovery
OCS has launched a brand new partnership to provide cooking classes for clients of two addiction recovery facilities! Oberlin is home to Alpha House (for men) and Georgia House (for women), which offer free faith-based rehabilitation programs with drug and alcohol counseling.
OCS Resilience Coordinator Marla Brewer has created a basic cooking course for recovery clients, using Janet’s Community Kitchen at the Cooper Community Resource Center. In the pilot class, folks learned how to make a creamy Cajun chicken pasta — which was delicious, easy, and affordable!
The goal is to provide people in recovery addiction with tools to be more self-sufficient. Recovery house staff tell us their clients often struggle with basic life skills, including cooking.
Marla, who also works with the Rural Response Network to reduce opioid overdoses in southern Lorain County, is uniquely positioned to help provide kitchen education to folks in recovery. The pilot was sponsored by RRN’s grant, which also provided kitchen supplies to stock Alpha and Georgia houses with utensils and cookware. Participants spent time learning the basics of kitchen safety, chopping vegetables, melting butter, and cooking in a saucepan — and took home the pasta recipe along with all the ingredients to make it themselves.
Retired chef Bruce Reeves helped Marla co-lead the class, which will be offered to recovery clients once or twice each month as long as funding is available.
His advice: Don’t worry about getting the recipe wrong, Bruce said. Everyone who cooks has made mistakes, and every chef experiments with different ingredients. He encouraged recovery clients to mix up the recipe with different spices, vegetables, meats, and pasta types.
Meadow Educational Services joins the Cooper Center
Kris Gilland is bringing more children to the Cooper Community Resource Center! Her practice, Meadow Educational Services, now has two offices on the second floor, where she will offer pediatric speech therapy, parent and professional training, and (starting this spring) nature-based education and activities.
“I’m excited to move into this building with so many other services that all share a love for helping others,” Kris said. “This is a great opportunity to join a terrific group of people and organizations that do so much to help everyone in our community.”
To learn more about Meadow Educational Services, visit meadowedservices.com or call (440) 207-0576.
A Very Big Year for Food Programs
What a tremendous year for the OCS food pantry! We got food to 2,505 unduplicated families with 7,729 unduplicated members and had 21,250 pantry visits and deliveries, which represents a 6.4% increase over 2025.
Food went to 2,409 children (31%), 3,924 working-age adults (51%), and 1,396 seniors ages 60+ (18%). We noted a significant shift in the composition of households seeking food assistance, with slightly fewer seniors (60+) and many more small (2-3 members) families with babies and toddlers coming to the pantry. OCS welcomed 995 "new" households — those that had never before come to our nonprofit for food — of which 382 had never before accessed a food pantry in all of Ohio.
The surge was especially high in October during the federal government shutdown, which stopped SNAP payments to roughly 34,000 people in Lorain County. Now 2026 is off to a fast-paced start, with 720 unique families getting food in January, totaling more than 1,200 food pantry visits and deliveries.
What’s ahead?
Changes to SNAP (the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often referred to as “food stamps”) are likely to drive more people to seek help from OCS and other food pantries across the nation. About 34,000 Lorain County residents (about 10 percent of the population) receive these benefits, which help lower their grocery bills and free up household budgets to cover rent, utility bills, school costs, clothing, gas, medicine, and other necessities.
Major SNAP changes made by Congress in HB1 include:
• Work requirements have been expanded to include adults ages 55-64, adults living with children ages 14 and older, veterans, youth phasing out of foster care, and people who are homeless.
• Legal immigrants in special categories (refugees, asylees, and victims of trafficking) will no longer be eligible to receive SNAP benefits.
Do you want to plant a garden? We have the seeds to make doing so easy and inexpensive! OCS is committed to increasing food security across Lorain County — and that starts with encouraging people to grow food. Gardens produce healthy fruit and vegetables, and are a sustainable source of essentially free food year after year after year. During the Great Seed Giveaway, we’ll have packets of corn, lettuce, spinach, string bean, radish, pea, onion, and turnip seeds along with many other types from arugula to watermelon. We’ll also have a wide array of flower seeds to beautify your landscape and attract pollinators. As the event name implies, the seeds are FREE. The Great Seed Giveaway is open to all Lorain County residents, regardless of income.
How can I donate to OCS?
There are lots of ways to donate to OCS — mail a check, give online, use PayPal, make a gift of stock, even include OCS in your estate planning. Learn more by clicking the button below.
Thank you to our volunteers!
We have some pretty awesome volunteers who help get the food pantry ready every week (props to Kayleigh, who is pictured here sorting eggs into cartons). In January, they braved some pretty extreme temperatures to donate their time, muscle, and energy. Thank you, volunteers — we really mean it when we say we couldn’t do it without your generosity!
You can donate right from our Walmart wishlist
Did you know we have a wish list? You can buy items for the OCS food pantry via our Walmart online registry. It highlights dozens of low-cost nonperishable staples that are especially useful for the thousands of families we serve. To buy food to donate to the OCS pantry, visit www.tinyurl.com/OCSwishlist and browse the list! Donations can be shipped or brought to the Cooper Center, 500 E. Lorain St., Oberlin, OH 44074.
