SHEFFIELD – The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a lot of hard-working families to make some tough decisions. Do they spend what money they have on medicine, gasoline, or food? It seems that most everybody, in some way is struggling. 
Ms. Penny Freeman and her cohort of volunteers have been working for years to help serve Shoals families in need with supplemental food supplies. She told The Quad-Cities Daily that The Meal Barrel Food Pantry has been serving families from donations of food from all over the State of Alabama. But with the onset of COVID-19 and the extraordinary levels of unemployment, it has been a real struggle for her to get enough food into the pantry for the weekly Wednesday afternoon distribution. She says there’s enough supply in the State, but with this level of demand, it has been a real struggle to get the food supplies from the sources into the Sheffield facility.
So that’s where Mr. Willy Phillips, a member of her church, came into the picture. Mr. Phillips is a truck driver for Service One Transport which is based in The Shoals. 
He brought the Food Pantry’s situation to Robert Walker and Kelly Robinson at Service One to see how they could offer some help in getting people-in-need the food they require. Walker jumped into action and provided an 18-wheeler, a driver and the fuel – completely free of charge – to travel wherever the food supplies were, and deliver it to the Food Bank.
Wednesday was the first delivery. And although it was a gray, rainy day, the smiles of Freeman and her fellow volunteers lit up the morning when the Service One truck pulled into the loading dock at the old National Guard Armory on the corner of Avalon and Atlanta Avenues.
This looks like the beginnings of a beautiful collaboration.
