The people who seek help, especially during the holiday season, are the parents in your carpool, your friend at yoga, the neighbor to whom you wave to every day.

To provide those families and individuals a holiday meal, local food pantries need help filling the shelves.

The Riverside Christian Food Pantry has serviced 936 households and 2,827 individuals, and served 41,926 meals over the last 12 months – just in Merrimack.

Riverside Christian could use financial support to help put together its Thanksgiving baskets and to keep going through the holidays, said Dave Morang, who keeps the books for the charity.

“We buy food from the food bank,” he said. “A lot of people don’t realize that, but we actually pay. It’s very cheap, but we do have to buy food.”

In the last 12 months, it has purchased more than $3,400 worth of food from the food bank for the pantry.

“So, the monetary donations go a long way, because we can buy a lot more food than other people because we can buy food at a discount,” he said.

Local food pantries are also seeing people from Nashua and surrounding communities coming in for assistance like never before.

Officials at the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, which gave out 1,000 Thanksgiving baskets last year, expect that number to go up substantially this year, as well.

“We’re expecting record numbers this year because all of our numbers have been going up,” said Eileen Brady, a social worker at the soup kitchen. “It’s very bad because people are getting their hours cut back at work. And at this time of the year, people usually pick up jobs. But there’s so much competition for jobs.”

This year, like every year, several local charities and food pantries will hold community dinners and hand out food baskets. They need help from the community to not only do this, but to continue to provide daily food to families in need.

The Tolles Street Mission has seen its numbers rise from 150 people a month to 600. This year, the mission will provide Thanksgiving baskets to families, individuals and also helps eight community churches.

The mission will provide Thanksgiving baskets from noon-3 p.m. on Nov. 18, 19 and Nov. 21 and 22. People are given numbers and will be offered a movie and cider to make it more comfortable while they’re waiting in line, said Janis Jefferson, office manager at Tolles Street Mission.

“We’re still taking names. We have some turkeys left,” Jefferson said.

The food pantries are in need of pumpkin and other pie fillings, cranberry sauce, canned gravy, stuffing, pie crust mix, muffin and quick bread mix, cake mix, brownie mix, frosting, pudding, Jell-O, canned vegetables, mashed potato flakes, juice in plastic bottles and other nonperishables.

Brady said some of the best ways to help out the food pantry, or any charity with a food pantry, is to hold can drives at work, at holiday parties and through civic organizations.

Ariela Torgersen, director of the Corpus Christi Food Pantry in Nashua, said this is important because once the holidays are over, people will still need food. So, many pantries are starting to stockpile food and money.

Torgersen said while Corpus Christi gets a great deal of help from local churches, she’s trying to get businesses more involved in giving.

“Whether there are three people or 300 people in the company, have a food drive to benefit us,” she said. “It doesn’t always have to be at Thanksgiving time, it can be in January or whenever.”

Torgersen said Corpus Christi could use toiletries such as toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo and toilet paper. It also can use everyday breakfast, lunch and dinner foods to help stock the pantry for after the holidays.

For Thanksgiving, Corpus Christi gives out turkeys and gift certificates to local grocery stores. Therefore, Torgersen said, donations of money would be greatly appreciated to buy gift cards. Any extra money goes toward buying gift cards for Christmas baskets and food to give out after the holidays.

It’s a similar situation at the Tolles Street Mission, said Bishop Josephine Norwood, who runs the pantry.

Norwood said the mission could also use monetary donations to help finance the trucks needed to deliver the meals and other costs of food storage and gathering.