The Challenge
The primary challenge faced by the food pantry is funding. It requires a significant amount of money to cover operational costs, such as postage for delivering food boxes, wages for workers, and other essential expenses.
The Approach
The West End Community Center’s food pantry depends on loyal and caring supporting organizations for food donations from retail chains, restaurant chains, and individuals, which are then distributed back to the community.
The WECC food pantry is part of “Feeding America”. This program is run by the Food Bank, and retail stores are partnered with them for weekly donation pickups. The WECC is currently partnered with 6 different grocery stores. Monetary donations earmarked for food is typically spent on holiday turkey’s, and produce purchases from Farm Fresh RI. Additionally, the pantry assembles food boxes specifically for seniors that are delivered weekly directly to their homes.
By The Numbers
The food pantry has made a significant impact, not only in the West End community, but throughout Rhode Island.
- Number of people served per week: 550-600
- Number of food boxes for seniors per week: 50-60
- Pounds of produce per year: 9,250 lbs
- Pounds of meat per year: 17,550 lbs
Ensure Food Security for All Rhode Islanders
The West End Community Center’s food pantry serves the socio-economically diverse community in Providence’s West End, an area burdened with poverty, unstable housing, language and educational barriers, and other obstacles to economic success. These factors point to the necessity of a one-stop shop place like WECC, which can assist neighborhood residents with the various issues they face. Residents of the West End are unlikely to venture out of the neighborhood for services, mainly due to lack of personal car ownership.
Program Description
The West End Community Center’s food pantry serves the socio-economically diverse community in Providence’s West End, an area burdened with poverty, unstable housing, language and educational barriers, and other obstacles to economic success. These factors point to the necessity of a one-stop shop place like WECC, which can assist neighborhood residents with the various issues they face. Residents of the West End are unlikely to venture out of the neighborhood for services, mainly due to lack of personal car ownership.
The West End Community Center’s food pantry has made Rhode Island better through their adaptive ability, and innovative new ideas. An example of this innovation is when they discovered that many Rhode Islanders who would benefit from their food pantry lived quite far from the center itself, so they came up with the creative idea of a Mobile Food Pantry to ensure Rhode Islanders from all over would have access to food items they need. Last summer, the Mobile Food Pantry conducted 17 pop-up distributions, most of which occurred at senior high rises and living communities. Each distribution was 2 pallets of fresh produce.
Future Plans
The goal behind the WECC food pantry system has always been to meet the needs of the community. They plan to continue using creativity to problem solve when challenges come up, so they can continue to do the most they can for the community. This includes things like more of the Mobile Food Pantry pop-ups, and expanding deliveries to outside of the West End.
This story was prepared by Katherine M. Bourgault.