Annual event creates a welcoming environment as participating families shop for gifts and needed items
The counters and shelves at the Wellston Center were neatly stacked with new treasures for sale — small household appliances, bedding and towels, toys, sporting goods, candles and perfume.
Shirley Robinson walked the perimeter of the room and carefully selected a small electric skillet, a silverware set and some towels for a woman she had been helping who recently had a baby. Robinson met the mom several years ago as she was helping administer a utility bill assistance program through Father Bob’s Outreach at St. Augustine Church in north St. Louis.
“I have been helping throughout the year with different clothes and food for them, because she had a high-risk pregnancy and she had to be off her feet,” Robinson, a member of St. Peter Claver Parish, said. “It’s been hard, it’s a struggle, but she’s doing her very best.”
Robinson reached out to the Wellston Center to see if she could get the mom signed up for the Christmas Club, an annual program held over two days in December featuring hundreds of new items donated from about a dozen parishes and sold for deeply discounted prices. The week before, participating families received boxes filled with food for Christmas dinner.
A means to take ownership
Sister Mary Beckman, SSND, and Sister Ann Marie Owen, OSU, started the Wellston Center in 1992 from the merger of five Catholic parishes in north St. Louis — St. Barbara, Notre Dame de Lourdes, St. Mark, St. Rose and St. Edward, which became St. Augustine — to serve the needs of low-income residents in the area. (In 2023, St. Augustine and three other parishes were combined to become St. Peter Claver Parish; the Wellston Center continues its work as an independent nonprofit organization.)
The food pantry operates three days a week and distributes about five to seven days’ worth of food per person each month, including milk, eggs, meat, produce, bread, cereal, snacks and canned goods. The center serves families in four zip codes in Wellston and the surrounding areas.
Sister James Lorene Hogan, CSJ, started the annual Christmas Club in 1993, which quickly became the center’s largest event. About 240 residents are selected to shop over two days, and each family spends a fraction of the retail cost of the donated items. Any profit goes back into the center for next year. Participants also shop for gently used clothing from the thrift store, which outside of the Christmas Club operates four days a week.
“A lot of families tell us they want to be able to shop and take ownership of it and to be able to choose (items) for ourselves and feel like we’ve purchases it for our kids,” executive director Andrew Diemer said. “The idea is that you spend a lot of this for your kids so that they have something to unwrap on Christmas.”
Beyond the Christmas Club, the Wellston Center has seen an increase in the need for food following the tornado that struck St. Louis in May and a halt in SNAP benefits in November. Before the tornado, the center had been serving about 400 families per month; by November, that number had increased to 500 families.
To help meet the increased demand, the center partnered the Community Impact Network, Beyond Housing, the Legacy Center and a local childcare center to distribute an additional 500 boxes of food, along with milk, eggs and frozen meats, to centralized neighborhood locations twice in November.
The Christmas Club is considered one of the center’s most valuable programs because it helps build relationships with the people they serve, Diemer said. “This strengthens that bond even more, and I hope it lets us serve them better,” he said. “It’s nice to see people in the holiday season celebrating, smiling and having a good time together.”
“The things that we value the most are human dignity and treating everybody with equality,” Diemer said. “We believe that everybody should have the right to food, but I think we treat people with dignity and to recognize that … we can’t break anybody’s cycle of poverty just from what we give out each month. It’s incumbent upon us to make a welcoming environment, someplace that people can come back to and ask for help without feeling self-conscious.”
