MANSFIELD — The St. Peter’s Catholic Church bake sale shines a light on one of the biggest assets of Richland County: community.
The sale takes place at 104 West First Street in the cafeteria. It continues until 6 p.m. Tuesday night and runs from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Wednesday.
Ann Brown, coordinator of the annual event, said she works her volunteers hard, but they enjoy every moment of it.
“This is our traditional Easter Bake Sale that we’ve had for so long, no one knows when it started,” she said. “It raises money to buy wine and anything to do with the sacrament. But more importantly, it is to bring the community together.
“We have a phenomenal group of volunteers who help out with this event. We have a tremendous amount of volunteers, too.”
The large group of volunteers come from all over the county, Brown said. The group worked for nearly 80 hours making baked goods and candy. They produced 4,500 cabbage rolls and enough chocolate egg and other Easter shaped candy to fill the church’s cafeteria.
“We have people that are not even Catholic; we have every denomination,” Brown said. “They come because they love doing it. We work very, very hard, and there are many hours people put in, but they enjoy doing it.”
The church expects to make $15,000 to $16,000 from the bake sale, Brown said.
“We do make quite a bit of money — quite a few thousand dollars — so this is an extremely large bake sale,” Brown said.
Mary Jane Wilson, a member of St. Peter’s said she came out for the chocolate and the baked goods.
“I like it all,” she said. “The anise cookies are my favorite. They are really good. The baklava is good; everything is really good.”
Wilson said she comes every year to drop off cookies she has baked and to socialize with others.
“We want to enjoy it,” she added.
Brown thanked all of her help for such a successful bake sale. She said she couldn’t have done it without them.
“You don’t get a project like this done without this number of volunteers. All 60 of the volunteers know what they are doing. They just take ownership of it; it makes my job so easy,” she said. “In a world that’s a but secular and self-centered, this is our way of giving back.
“Just being together and doing something good where they can see the results of their efforts.”
