NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The outpouring of shock and grief from around the world over the horrific events in this picturesque New England town has given way to another widely felt, powerful emotion: the urge to support the shattered families of the victims.   

“I just had a lady call from Montana,” said Scudder Smith, publisher of the Newtown Bee, the local paper. "She said she’s going to send me a box of bears to distribute when the time is right so the kids can hug some bears.”

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As details of Friday’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary continue to unfold, residents remain stunned by the mayhem unleashed by a lone gunman. On Saturday, authorities disclosed the names of the 12 girls, eight boys and six adult women who were killed in the nation's second-worst school shooting. 

The scope of the tragedy has been matched by a torrent of offers to help.

Since just hours after the massacre, local churches and social service agencies have been besieged with phone calls and emails from around the country and the world -- as far away as Taiwan, Australia and West Africa. Some callers express a sense of powerlessness in trying to help shattered families rebuild their lives, along with a bewilderment in trying to know what to do.

Leo McIlrath, chaplain at the Lutheran Home of Southbury, said one way to support the wounded community is to “pray from a distance.”

“That’s more powerful than anything they can do up close - including providing food or shelter," he said. "We do all that already in this community. We don’t need people to put something in a box, I don’t think, and send it here. We need to be as of one mind and one heart and one spirit. And I feel that’s coming across.”

The outpouring of global grief has generated a flood of offers of financial contributions, according to Newtown Savings Bank President John Trentacosta.

“We’ve been hearing from people all over the country asking how they can help and what they can do to support he families,” he said. “This all happened so quickly.”

In response, several groups have set up websites to accept contributions, including a joint effort between Newtown Savings and the United Way of Western Connecticut. The Sandy Hook School Support Fund is accepting donations via the Web, or by check mailed to Sandy Hook School Support Fund, Newtown Savings Bank, 39 Main St., Newtown CT 06470. Donations are also being accepted at the bank's local branches.

Local residents have also taken up the cause. Neighbors and friends have been preparing meals for the bereaved families, and counseling agencies have tapped an influx of volunteers to help cope with the psychological trauma.   

Santas for Sandy Hook
Clad in Santa caps and armed with a handwritten "Santas for Sandy Hook" sign, Zoe Walter, 21, her sister and a friend stood outside a local coffee and donuts shop Saturday asking for donations to the newly created support fund.

As she briefly silenced her handbell, Walter said she was shaken by the killings.

"I just want them to know that we care and we're here, and we'll do anything that we can (to) help," said Walter, a college student, as she broke down in tears. "I just want them to know that we're thinking about them."

At New Hope Community Church, pastor Jim Solomon has been fielding calls since shortly after the Friday morning tragedy.

“We’ve been getting what seems like literally thousands of inquiries,” he said. “I’m touched by the level of support not only from all around our nation but from around the world. They want to do something practical.”

In response, Solomon has also set up a fund on the church’s Web site, asking contributors for suggestions on how the money should be spent.

“If they indicate what the funds are for, the church treasurer is going to dispense those funds to help each of the particular families,” he said. “We’re going to use that money to help each family with food or funeral and memorial services, burial expenses or any other needs so we can help them in a very practical way."

Solomon, a counselor, is also a board member at Newtown Youth and Family Services, which is offering free counseling to victims’ families and other residents.

In the aftermath of natural disasters, communities often see an influx of donated food, clothing and other emergency supplies. Local clergy say the school shooting in Newtown was a very different type of disaster, calling for a very different response.

“There’s an awful lot to just knowing that people care,” said Rev. Raymond Petrucci, a chaplain at nearby Danbury Hospital. “If there’s any way people can communicate through the public media or whatever forms of saying, ‘We truly are supporting and praying for you hoping for you,’ that type of emotional support - especially for that community, it’s already close-knit - is the most appropriate way of approaching this.”

In a world awash in social media, grief also flowed online.

On Twitter, the #Newtown hashtag emerged almost immediately, promptly flooded with emotional outpouring and soon began trending. On Google+, many gathered around the topic "Sandy Hook" for consolation. Facebook users created multiple pages to share news and prayers with friends.

Reddit users inundated the Connecticut subreddit with fundraising initiatives, local news, and opportunities to "vent your fears, anger, frustration and anything else." By midday Saturday, the local NewtownPatch had drawn more than 500 “I want to help” comments on a page devoted to supporting local residents.

In Newtown, some people are showing their support just by showing up.

At a Friday night vigil at St. Rose of Lima church, the crowd spilled out into the freezing weather, trying to make sense of the tragedy. Another townwide vigil is planned for Sunday night at Newtown High School.

“I know people will be coming from out of town,” said McIlrath. “There using the high school because there is no church big enough.”

McIlrath, who plans to speak at the service, was still working out what he wants to say.    

“I heard a lot of people say the joy is gone,” said McIlrath. “I want to say, ‘No, the joy isn’t stolen from us - no more than Grinch stole Christmas. Death isn’t going to steal the joy out of this community.”

NBC's Miranda Leitsinger and Rosa Golijan contributed to this report.

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The worst American drought in more than half a century is driving up grain prices and deepening worries about global food shortages.

With much of the corn crop already lost, farmers are holding out hope for some weather relief that could help salvage the harvest of soybeans and other. But the latest data from the government Friday showed that the damage to the food supply chain already has been done.

“This is worse than 2008 -- we’re in kind of a perfect storm scenario,” said Ana Puchi-Donnelly, senior agricultural commodities trader at London-based Marex Spectron. “We won’t really know until the whole crop is harvested. We’re talking about the worst drought in the last 50 to 70 years in one of the hottest years on record."

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Shriveling supplies have sent grain prices soaring. Corn futures set an all-time high Friday to levels roughly 50 percent higher than the end of May, before the drought took hold. Soybean prices also jumped this week to more than 25 percent above pre-drought levels.

While those price spikes have yet to work their way through the food chain, American consumers can expect to pay more to put dinner on the table. The overall impact on food prices, however, is expected to relatively small.

“If you're a family of four on a tight budget, it's not inconsequential,” Gregory Page, CEO of Cargill, one of the world’s largest food producers, told CNBC. “But to put it in context, it is about $75 per man, woman and child here in the U.S. vs. the levels we saw a year ago.”

The outlook for this year’s harvest has changed dramatically over just a few months. In the spring, U.S. corn farmers planted the most acreage in 75 years and expected a record harvest. Countries that rely on the United States as the world’s largest food exporter were hopeful the yield would replenish depleted global stockpiles.

But those hopes have been dashed as farmers sift through their drought-parched farmlands. The government’s latest estimate of this year’s harvest, released Friday, was even worse than expected. After predicting a bumper crop of nearly 15 billion bushels of corn in June, the USDA Friday predicted a harvest of less than 11 billion bushels, 13 percent below last year's level.

Expected corn yields were slashed from June’s estimate of 166 bushels per acre to just 123 bushels, some 25 percent below normal. Inventories of soybeans, widely used as livestock feed from India to Indiana, will be the smallest in nine years.

There is little sign of relief in the weather forecast. The severest conditions -– which have already enveloped more than a third of the nation -– continued to spread this week, according to a report Thursday from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska. July was the hottest month on record, beating the worst month of the Dust Bowl era in 1936. After mild weather allowed farmers to plant earlier than normal this year, modest rainfall in parts of the Midwest this week came too late for much of the crop.

"There will be some improvement; the cooler temperatures certainly will help,” said Andy Karst, a meteorologist for World Weather. “But most of the Midwest has not had enough rain for significant improvement. Crops may stabilize or decline a little more the next couple of weeks."

Though food inflation in the U.S. so far has been relatively tame, the surge in crop prices is expected to move quickly through the global food chain, pushing up prices of beef, poultry and other processed foods.

Cattle ranchers already are dipping into stockpiles of hay set aside for winter after the drought killed much of the grass forage they typically rely on during the summer months.

"We don't have much hay, we don't have much corn, we don't have much of really anything,” Brett Crosby, a cattle rancher in Cowley, Wyo., told CNBC. “Over half of the pastures in the United States are rated poor to very poor in condition."

The U.S. crop shortfall comes as the rest of the global supply chain is already under pressure. Hot weather in Russia and too much rain in farmlands in Brazil have lowered crop yields, further straining inventories.

Demand, meanwhile, remains strong in the developing world, even as the global economy slows. The shrunken forecast for this year’s crop has raised concerns that the world could see another repeat of the severe shortfall in 2008 that led to food riots in some countries.

“Supplying countries put on embargoes against exports and we had importing countries that in many cases were buying more than they actually need,” said Page. “The combination of those two actions by governments exacerbated the sense of shortfall and I think accelerated the price increases."

Page this year’s expected shortfall -- between 3 and 4 percent below the long-term trend in production levels -- is “manageable, if we make good decisions.”

That effort would require a coordinated global effort by governments to head off potential bottlenecks that produced big food price spikes in 2008. Those moves could include scaling back government subsidies put in place to promote biofuel production, which has diverted corn and soy supplies.

"Several urgent actions must be taken to address the current situation to prevent a potential global food price crisis," said Shenggen Fan, head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a think tank funded by the World Bank. 

(Reuters contributed.)

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