When Not to Start Your Own Food Pantry

With hunger rates rapidly rising, brutal cuts happening to vital emergency services, and inflation continuing, it can be very tempting to believe that we need more food pantries. Food pantries are an important service for keeping hunger at bay as people lose their SNAP benefits. But it’s important to understand that most of the time, starting a new food pantry is not the most effective way to fight hunger in your neighborhood.

Signs your community doesn’t need a new food pantry

• You already have several pantries distributed throughout the area. They may not be open very often and may serve as few as 10-15 households per distribution. However, they already have infrastructure, food supply, and a volunteer base.

Helping them increase and improve their services is infinitely more effective than starting a competing pantry. (In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin advocates pantries merging to create fewer, larger organizations. It’s taken a couple years for my thinking to evolve, but I now fully agree with that guidance.) Bigger pantries have more capacity for addressing the specific needs of the people they serve, accessing food and volunteers, and maintaining a focus on food justice.

• Community members are looking for volunteer opportunities. While it’s great to have eager volunteers, we must remember that the services we’re designing should support shoppers first. Starting a food pantry as a high school project or neighborhood engagement activity doesn’t demonstrate a commitment to fighting hunger, and is less likely to be sustainable or effective for the people who need services.

• You’re struggling to find a consistent source of reliable food. If the local food bank isn’t accepting new partners and all your local grocery stores already have established donation programs, it may be very difficult to establish a food supply that is relevant or helpful to your guests.

I’ve seen many pantries adopt a competitive mindset focused on “stealing” stores from other pantries to improve their food supply, which loses focus on the reality that we are trying to fight hunger. If your food pantry can’t provided reliable food, people can’t count on it as an emergency resource and will look elsewhere.

Signs your community does need a new food pantry

• Your local food bank is actively seeking new partners in your neighborhood. Data collected by them or other organizations demonstrates that there is a need for food pantry services and there are resources available to support them.

• There are only one or two pantries in your area and they’re inaccessible to some, such as far away from public transportation, have unreliable hours, don’t welcome everyone, or so limited that they must turn people away.

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While there are times when we do need new food pantries, right now it’s urgent that we pour energy and resources into the people and programs who are already experts in the field. I don’t intend to shut down your enthusiasm (and I love the stories I hear about free shelves that organically evolve into pantry-like projects,) its relevant that we focus on where we dedicate resources. Helping existing nonprofits expand and do better has a much stronger impact on fighting hunger than starting a new one from scratch.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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