Since 2002 we’ve maintained a food shelf here at church, both for folks in our congregation and for people in our neighborhood who are having a hard time making ends meet. However, over the last year our food drives haven’t been generating as many bags of food and we’re having a hard time keeping up with the increasing needs in our community. Our food shelf is dying, and something needs to change!
We hope to raise $15,000 through Making Space this Christmas season so that we can pursue a revamp of our food shelf. By investing in some restaurant-grade equipment (a code requirement) and renovating a couple rooms in our building, we could potentially host a “public” food shelf that’s tied into other resources in the community. We’d be eligible for grants, we would have the benefit of shared reporting with other food shelves, and we could get bulk food inexpensively from organizations like Second Harvest.
We need to work with the City of Maplewood to finalize the plans, but we’re excited about this new direction, and believe it’s far more sustainable than the model we’ve been using up until now!