Last month, we visited Nourish Pierce County’s Lakewood food pantry at United Methodist Church. Carol May, Nourish Pierce County’s Volunteer Coordinator, gave us a tour while volunteers prepped for opening. We arrived about five minutes before distribution and cars were already lined up around the corner with people in need of groceries. Volunteers were working hard to realize the Nourish mission, “to provide nutritious food and support services to people in need with compassion, dignity, and respect.”

Prior to COVID-19, the food pantry used a shopping method where guests self-selected their food. Now guests use a drive up method where food is prepacked by volunteers and carted out to their vehicle. To maintain social distancing, the number of pre-packed boxes a family receives is based on household size., but groceries are still distributed by family size. Guests are able to pick up groceries for other families who are unable to make it to the food pantry, which allows increased access for those who may be unable to leave their houses due to the pandemic. Hygiene products and diapers are displayed curbside and made available on request.

Lakewood Nourish provides each household with three nutritious meals a day for three days: consisting of protein, fresh produce, and bread. The volunteers who keep the food pantry open work in shifts, the first shift sets up and the second shift builds boxes and manages distribution. All of this is done outside under a few canopies. Come winter, Carol isn’t sure how she will be able to recruit volunteers to stand in the cold and rain to do this set-up. Food pantries have become used to these constantly changing variables and will once again adapt to meet the needs of their guests can volunteers as the pandemic continues.

The champion of this food pantry, like many others, is the crew of reliable volunteers. On the day we visited, there were about eight community volunteers working as a team to fill up shopping carts with milk, produce, and canned goods. In addition, this site has six National Guard members that support the day-to-day operations. While their support is essential to keeping the food pantry running, many of these guard members are away from their families across the country to do this work. Carol expressed the need to recruit local community members to replace the guard members help so they can return home or be reassigned.

Generous donors, government support, and partnership with Emergency Food Network allow for this food pantry to be sure they have enough food to give out. One thing they are in desperate need of is helping hands. While it is nice to have ongoing support, Carol says that even offering to volunteer one day each month will make a huge impact on the need. We talked to volunteers that day to ask them why they continue to volunteer with Nourish Pierce County, each one of them said it was the people they’ve met and the relationships they’ve made. Consider volunteering to ensure sites like this can stay open and maybe you’ll make some new friends along the way!