Loaves & Fishes Food Pantry Inc.

Loaves & Fishes Food Pantry gives food with kindness and compassion to anyone who seeks assistance while providing an opportunity for volunteers to help their neighbors.

If food insecurity continues to exist, we want to be able to continue to nourish our neighbors with

Goal One: Increase access to our services

Goal Two: Look for ways to better communicate with non-native speakers.

Goal Three: Expanding our hours to serve more and accommodate those with specific needs

There are conferences in which members of our staff are encouraged to participate to learn more about the industry and network with others so we can better achieve our goals as a team.

COVID-19 forced us to be more creative and flexible in how we work. We knew we would not and could not stop providing food with kindness and compassion because of a pandemic, particularly when so many of our neighbors were hurting. The pandemic made us rethink how we use volunteers (once 70% of our labor to sort, stock, and distribute food), how to get food to people without bringing them inside the pantry, and how to keep our staff, a much smaller core group of volunteers, and those we serve as safe as possible from exposure to COVID-19. We wear masks and sanitize carts after each visitor, take and log our temperature when we enter the facility, and follow social-distancing, travel, and testing protocols. Since March 2020, we have been distributing food outside, three days a week, rain or shine. At the same time, we’ve learned a lot from operating outside our comfort zone: our former volunteer, now staff, dietitian helps choose the food we give out so it is healthier than it was in the past; we have developed and refined standards for providing a minimum of 100 lbs. of food to every household that visits, with more for larger households; and we now have three staff members who are fluent in Spanish, which we hope makes our Hispanic visitors more comfortable. We were able to raise funds to add an additional walk-in refrigerator and freezer, enabling us to store and give out more perishable food. Furthermore, many of those coming for food say they prefer the convenience of receiving their groceries in the parking lot. Now, we are looking to expand access to food by offering food pickups by appointment (as opposed to first-come, first-served drive-throughs), providing more culturally specific foods, and reintroducing a way for visitors to specify which foods, if any, they do not want.