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LindaBen Scribes, Quarter 2 2025 Edition
✍️ LindaBen Scribes, Quarter 2 2025 Edition
Stories, Updates, and Insights from the Heart of Our Work
“If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness.” — Isaiah 58:10
💌 Welcome Letter: From Our Founder
Dear Friends and Supporters,
Welcome back to LindaBen Scribe — our quarterly reflection of impact, gratitude, and shared progress. After some time away, we are relaunching this newsletter with full hearts and open arms. In these pages, you’ll find not only updates, but evidence of your support in action.
Over the past seasons, we’ve grown not just in programs, but in purpose. What began as a grassroots mission has evolved into a powerful, community-run movement — shaped and led by the people we serve, our neighbors, and our local partners.
Our impact has only been possible because of the collective effort of our volunteers, families, and community-based organizations. Together, we’ve built something rooted in empathy, equity, and belonging.
We’ve listened. We’ve learned. And we’ve deepened our mission to nourish families — through every produce box and power snacks, every pantry visit, every garden bed, every nutrition workshop, and every advocacy action we take together.
“From fresh produce to power snacks, from hands in the soil to voices in advocacy — each act of love and compassion is a chapter in the shared story we’re writing, with dignity at its heart.”
Thank you for walking alongside us. This movement belongs to all of us — and it’s only just beginning.
With partnership and purpose,
Anna Beavan
Founder & CEO, LindaBen Foundation
🧭 Organizational Pulse
Leadership Update
In May our co-founder James B Beavan III joined LindaBen as full-time CFO in addition to his role as Treasurer on our Board of Directors and Executive Committee. James is a graduate of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at The University of Maryland with over 25 years’ experience. He has worked in a broad range of industries and company sizes throughout the DMV in his career in various accounting, controller and CFO roles. In addition to the normal CFO duties, James has agreed to handle creating this newsletter you are reading now, our monthly Healthy Foods Newsletter as well as and handling our Social Media postings.
Personnel News
We welcomed Arinze Okeke back in April as a volunteer and part-time worker only to see him head to San Antonio in June to follow his passion for artwork/graphic design. In May James B Beavan IV briefly joined us as an intern before leaving in late June to head off to Georgia Tech to study Mathematics. To replace James, we brought in Brandon Talavera as a summer intern, he is the son of Noralyn who is on our Board. Also, in late June we hired Neomi Sule, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, to build an app to help track volunteer engagement and employee time.
New Space
This Spring we entertained the idea of finding a real warehouse space, but with our small operation size/budget the options were very limited. So instead, we took on additional space here on Tucker Street to further expand our RX Food As Medicine program. The new space has allowed us to fully separate the pantry/food rescue operation from the RX/Power Pack program, which will allow them both to thrive and flourish.
🍽️ Feeding with Dignity: Program Highlights
Food as Medicine (RX) Produce Box 🧠 🥗🗣️
Our RX Produce Box program has become a big success with the schools in Prince George’s County. This program provides school selected families with 50+ pounds of fresh produce, another 30+ pounds of pantry favorites along with eggs, meat, milk and bread, digital nutrition toolkit and workshops. The program was also introduced to Charles County Public Schools in the Spring of 2025.
Our Blessings in a Backpack program served over 1,400 students a month at schools in Howard County, Charles County and Prince George’s County Maryland this past school year. The program provides each student with a pack of 8 healthier snack items for the weekend.
Community Pantry 🛒🍽️🥪
Our on-site Community Pantry in Beltsville continues to grow serving families on Tuesday and Wednesday evening where we typically see 75 unique families each evening. We have fully converted Unit# 222 into a pantry only with one room dedicated to fresh produce and the other gathering space housing our shelf stable items and registration area. Families come in once a week and shop for what food items they like to eat as well as getting diapers. Most of our pantry food comes from Food rescue & Capital Area Food Bank while diapers come from the Maryland Diaper Bank.
Our off-site Community Pantry is at St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in Riverdale 4 Tuesdays of every month, if there are 5 Tuesday’s we are off one of those days. On a typical Tuesday we serve 250 unique families at this large distribution. Most of the food at this event comes from Capital Area Food Bank and Passion & Compassion.
Community Garden 🌻 🪴 🌱
We have a community garden at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Fulton Maryland (Hope and Healing Garden) and at Riverdale Elementary School (Oasis Garden). The Church and School provided the seed money to get these gardens prepared and provide the tools needed to maintain them. Thanks to the variety of Sun & Rain this summer, both gardens are doing very well. The families in both areas are doing a good job in the upkeep of the gardens, proving that this model can work.
Cooking Club 👩🍳🥘🍳
We continue to sponsor a Cooking Club at Harpers Choice Middle School in Columbia Maryland through our partnership with United Way Central Maryland. We have provided them with some cooking tools and the majority of the food items they need to feed 40 students at a time this summer. This program has been great for teaching kids to cook as well as making healthy food at home by choosing quality ingredients.
📊 Impact and Insights
Food as Medicine (Rx) Box: 🍎📦
During the 2024–2025 school year, we proudly delivered over 12,000 Rx Boxes to families across 11 schools in Prince George’s County and 5 schools in Charles County, Maryland. These nutrient-rich boxes provided a vital boost to household food budgets and helped ease the strain on families navigating food insecurity.
This impact would not have been possible without our hardworking LindaBen Rx Team and the capacity and consistency of our farm partners and local wholesale suppliers — some of whom have been in business for over 70 years. Your commitment to nourishing communities is the backbone of this program. Thank you.
While as an organization we began work in August of 2020, we didn’t start tracking some key metrics until 2022. Using the data from 2022-June 2025 we have hit some amazing numbers, 1.7 million meals provided based on 2.4 million pounds of food distributed. This food has been served to over 180,000 individuals.
As part of this process we have managed to rescue over 480,000 pounds of food from Whole Foods, Panera and Insomnia Cookies. Thanks to our partnership with the Maryland Diaper Bank, we have distributed over 124K baby essentials during this time.
Lastly, our Blessings in a Backpack program has provided over 85K hunger free weekends for students.
💸 Grants and Growth
Partnerships
In March we began a partnership with Amazon Local Good. Through this partnership Amazon provides us with labor and transportation services. This has greatly advanced our food rescue and distribution efforts, and the cost savings have allowed us to expand our outreach and pantry schedule.
Since 2021, Our partnership with Community Schools continues to expand exponentially specifically in Prince George's County through our Kids Power Packs program and Food as Medicine (Rx Box) Program that are both Fee for Services.
Grants
We have received a few different grants so far this year: the State of Maryland OAG Grant for $25,000, Capital Area Food Bank for $24,759, United Way of Central Maryland $10,000, Horizon Foundation $10,000, CarMax Cares $1,000 and Community Foundation of Howard County $1,000. These grants help us buy food, pay rent and cover some volunteer stipends.
Large Donors ($500+ Club)
We have a few large donors this year: Mr. Brian Liles, Mr. and Mrs. John and Florina Kennedy, Howard Chapel Ridgeville United Methodist Church, Mason Dixon Rug Hooking Guild, Riderwood Village, Mr. and Mrs. Ron & Loretta Farb, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul & Elena Attorri.
Fundraisers
Our Mikey & Mel’s Cruise-In Fundraiser from March-June raised $5,931 not accounting for merchandise costs. CarMax Cares has also partnered with us for some Mikey & Mel’s events providing volunteers to help at our booth as well as to help the event with traffic management.
Other
Mosaic Christian Church- Elkridge MD, a local church in Howard County donated 120 cases of prepacked dry meals with 36 bags per case to our organization...that's over 4000 meals!
🤝 Community Connections
Our partnership fundraiser at Mikey & Mel’s Cruise-In continued strongly this year for the 4th year in a row. This is the 3rd year of charity row at the car show, which is among the biggest in the DMV area. Including merchandise sales our revenue/donations from each of the 7 events consistently exceeds $1,000. We are grateful to Harley & Aaron Magden and Vu Nguyen for their continued support.
In May we had a special visit from Radha Muthiah, CEO of Capital Area Food Bank, along with their Maryland Director, Roberto Melara, and Augusta Fricke our Partnership Coordinator. We have nurtured a great relationship as our organizations work together to fight hunger and food insecurity in Prince George’s County. They love working with us because we are a data driven Foundation that takes advantage of technology to track and manage all the recipients of our services.
In the months of May-June we were able to attend training sessions on food handling, preparation and waste prevention by NourishNet through University of Maryland.
Porsche Club of America Chesapeake Region conducted a Food Drive on May 10th as part of their Safeway to the Bay Tour program. Club members showed their support for LindaBen Foundation by bringing bags and boxes of shelf stable food that went directly to Seabrook Elementary School.
This past Spring, through our partnership with Lighthouse Therapeutic Services we conducted a clothing giveaway during one of our big distributions at St. Bernard Catholic Church. We gathered donated new and used clothing and redistributed them to the families we serve.
📅 What's Coming Up
In July we plan to expand our pantry schedule to include Saturday morning. We are working on building out a volunteer team and schedule that will work for everyone.
Location #1: LindaBen Community Food Hub
*10739 Tucker St, STE 222, Beltsville, MD 20705
Open every Tuesday: 5pm - 6pm
Open every Wednesday: 4:30pm - 6pm
Open every Saturday: 10:00am - 1130am
*Diaper Distribution
Location #2: Saint Bernard Catholic Church- Candle Light Room
5700 St Bernard Dr, Riverdale, MD 20737
Tuesdays: 11am - 2pm
We have planned for August to participate in Back-to-School giveaways at 5 schools, Rosa Parks ES, Seabrook ES, Riverdale ES, Northwestern HS, Harpers Choice MS. We will also be at the big PG County Back to School event at the Sports & Learning Complex in Landover MD in August. We have budgeted $2,500 for these events for school supplies. We will also receive a nice size haul of school supplies from parishioner donations at St. Francis of Assisi in Fulton MD, Amazon Local Good and Bolana Inc.
In September we have a Flu Shot Clinic with Luminis Health scheduled, see details below:
LindaBen Site: 5700 Saint Bernard Drive Riverdale Park, MD 20737
Date: Tuesday, 23 September 2025
Time: 10 am– 1 pm
Want to stay in the loop? Join the LindaBen Community Action Team on WhatsApp! 💬
Stay connected with real-time updates on:
📅 Volunteer opportunities
🥕 Food distributions
🌱 Gardening, cooking, and wellness workshops
✅ Be kind • No spam • Community-focused updates only
🧺 Help Us Do More:
Make a Difference
Volunteering Creates Ripples of Change
By volunteering, you're not just donating time; you become a catalyst for positive change. Every hour you contribute helps a family eat healthier, a child focus better in school, and communities grow stronger together.
The impact is real. The joy is immediate. The difference is lasting.
Step in, roll up your sleeves, and experience the power of changing lives—one act of service at a time.
Bless Others, Be Blessed
Becoming a Monthly Giver Means Becoming a Lifeline
Your generosity makes it possible for us to provide healthy food, wellness support, and vital resources to families facing hardship right here in our community. But when you choose to give monthly, you create steady, reliable support that families can count on—month after month.
Even a small recurring gift builds hope and stability for neighbors who are struggling. Together, we can ensure no child goes to bed hungry and every family has the chance to thrive.
Thank you for standing with us—not just today, but every day.
Thank you!
Thank you for reading the first issue of our new quarterly publication! I hope to have the Q3 newsletter out more timely, late October is the goal.
Stay Connected
Current Executive Team, Board, and Key Volunteers/Staff
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