Fullerton : Food Given to Seniors for Feast of St. Joseph

St. Jude Hospital employees have been brown bagging it to work almost every day since March 8.

But instead of lunch, those brown bags contained food donations for local senior citizens; the bags were distributed on Tuesday in honor of the Feast of St. Joseph.

Workers at St. Jude hospitals in Fullerton and Yorba Linda donated about 400 bags of food, enough to provide at least 300 people with a full meal, to the Yorba Linda Senior Citizens’ Center and the Fullerton Senior Multi-Purpose Center. Sixty bags were donated also to the Friends in Service to Humanity (FISH) of Fullerton, a nonprofit interdenominational foundation.

“It looked like a wall-to-wall grocery store in here,” said Norm Anderson, vice president of community affairs. “We were very grateful for the donations and very pleased with the results. Many people brought in two or three bags . . . . Some people brought in grocery-size bags with enough canned goods to fill three or four smaller sacks.”

Nearly 1,200 lunch bag-size paper sacks were distributed March 7 with a letter from Sister Jane Frances, hospital president, asking each employee to fill the sack with enough canned or packaged goods for a full meal for one or two people. The food was distributed on the Feast of St. Joseph because St. Joseph is the patron saint of the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, who own and operate St. Jude Hospital.