A Helping Hand

We hope that this reading finds all of our Hudson Coffee Traders friends well and drying out. It has been an exhausting couple of weeks  and we welcome the sun back with grateful hearts.

While the power, cable and phone lines were out we were so happy to be able to afford many of you with a place to reconnect with your computers and power up your cell phones. Being able to provide our community with solace and comfort after the storm, be it a hot cup of coffee, an available power outlet or a friendly face is part of our mission here at HTC.

As you know many of the communities to the North of us were devastated by  the flooding from both Irene and Lee and so many of our farmers sustained heartbreaking losses. People are mobilizing all over the Hudson Valley to lend a hand volunteering, making donations and helping out any other way they can. We contacted our coffee roasters, Counter Culture, and they generously sent 70 pounds of coffee up to Windham to help sustain the volunteers and residences who are faced with a mind boggling clean-up effort.  If you are able, please consider donating to the food pantries in the area, there is a great deal of need up there.

The Phoenicia Methodist Church – 845.688.5670
The Christian Center in Margaretville at 845.586.4848
The United Methodist Church in Margaretville at 845.586.4764 and
the Fleischmanns UNited Methodist Church at 845.254.5261

A bit closer to home, around the corner in fact, our local food pantries have seen a 10 fold increase in demand. Family of Woodstock, New Paltz and The Queens Galley have all seen their supplies dwindle. There is a great need for canned foods and non-perishables in addition to many staples. Due to the extended power outages many families lost everything in their refrigerators; ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard included. If you are able, while you are out shopping, please consider purchasing a few extra cans of beans or boxes of cereal and dropping them off at your local food pantry.

Hopefully mother nature will give us a break from tempestuous weather for a good long time but they are saying we are in for a long, hard winter. In the interest of keeping everyone safe and up to date we’d like to recommend a Facebook page we’ve been following since last winter. Hudson Valley Weather is run by an amateur meteorologist, a weather enthusiast who relies on multiple sources to provide his own forecasts. The thing about this page is that he is spot on. Highly localized, HV Weater was consistently accurate throughout last winter and an absolutely indispensable source of information leading up and during Irene.The membership on the page went from 400 some odd likes to over 4600 during the storm and became a life line of information for  many people. The administrator of the page has also taken it upon himself to create a pay pal donations page so the membership could contribute to clean up efforts. This is a community page in every sense of the word so, next time you are on FB, check it out  and if you like it pass it along. The more people who are prepared and well informed the better off we’ll all be!

Enjoy the sun and please feel free to add any donation or volunteer opportunities in the comments.