VALE – The people at the Vale Food Pantry plan to provide the community more than cans of soup and packets of meat.
They instead want to create a community service center to help whittle away at the impoverishment that affects one out of five people in Vale.
Leaders of the pantry recently took their ambitions to the Malheur County Court. They asked commissioners to help with money to buy a building now being leased.
“I’m very impressed with your presentation,” Commissioner Jim Mendiola said.
The commissioners said they would consider the request.
Now, the pantry leaders want to mobilize the community. In a recent interview, they explained their goal and what is needed to reach it.
For nearly 20 years, the food pantry has been a place for those in need to get food.
Earlier this year, the food pantry moved out of basement quarters in the old Vale City Hall into a new building near Vale High School, a place with space to grow to help local people.
“We have begun to see our start to a brighter future as we give them the vision of no longer having to count on a couple of boxes of food every other week but a vision of hope as they learn to self-sustain,” Chairwoman Jessica Patton said in a statement to the commissioners.
The idea is to bring to Vale services that people from Vale to Brogan to Harper now have to travel to Ontario to get. The pantry would become a “hub” for help with job training, cooking and money management classes and social services.
“Our vision is a collaboration of partnerships working together to create strong, capable, self-sustaining individuals,” the pantry wrote in a summary of its new strategic plan.
The leaders’ vision
Patton, Vice Chairwoman Chris Strauchon and Treasurer Luwana Hinrich speak with passion and clarity about what could be done in Vale.
The food pantry recently moved into what was once a mortuary. A main room now serves as the grocery, providing food at no cost to clients. Against one wall, racks of clothing are set for the taking. One shelf carries baby supplies.
On the opposite wall hangs a jobs board, listing openings from throughout the area.
VALE FOOD PANTRY
Location: 222 Yakima St. S.
Hours: 1 p.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday, noon-3 p.m. Thursday
Phone: 541-212-8878
Board:
Jessica Patton, chairwoman
Christine Strauchon, vice chairwoman
Luwana Hinrich, treasurer
Connie Ussing, general manager
Rick Bennett
Cheryl Johnson
Ron Lopez
In a small room, children’s toys and books are stacked on low shelves – free for the taking. The food pantry recently got a $2,500 literacy grant from the Malheur Education Service District to stock even more books that parents can take for their children.
The food pantry also retrieved two small book stands – the “Little Free Library” kind that house books at streetside for people to take. They need help restoring them, intending to place one outside the pantry and one in downtown Vale.
Another room is being fashioned into a kitchen. The leaders plan to hold cooking classes. The idea is to help families learn to prepare the foodstuffs they can get from the pantry.
“We get a lot of produce given to us so it would be good to teach them how to use it,” Patton said.
The pantry leaders say the kitchen project needs donations of a rolling island, flooring and kitchen appliances.
The idea of a community center bubbled up in a meeting with city officials. The city at the time had notified the pantry it would need to move out of the old city hall. At the same time, Strauchon said, city leaders had decided they wouldn’t pursue their own idea of a community resource center.
“We figured out how to make it all come together,” Patton said.
Services increase
The seed of a center is growing. Community in Action, the Ontario nonprofit, has staff at the food pantry once a week. A state Employment Department worker keeps up the jobs board.
The leaders hope to one day offer job training classes to help people learn how to apply for work.
“This would be a perfect spot for that,” Patton said.
The concept is to deliver help for people to escape whatever is keeping them in poverty.
“Nobody wants to be in a position to ask for handouts,” Strauchon said.
One obstacle faced by those needing help is transportation. Strauchon notes that mothers show up at the food pantry, pushing a baby in a stroller.
“They’re loading food around the baby,” Strauchon said.
How does that person get to an Ontario nonprofit?
“It is a big thing for a lot of our population, including seniors, to get to Ontario,” she told county commissioners.
HANDYMAN NEEDED:
*Restore free library street stands
*Build wheeled vegetable carts
*Build shelving
Call 541-212-8878 to volunteer
As with many community ambitions, the food pantry has one pressing need: Money.
The pantry has a deal to buy the former mortuary building for $240,000. They have three years to come up with the money.
Meantime, the pantry pays $2,000 a month to lease the space. Not a dollar goes towards the purchase. Pantry leaders calculate they have another $1,000 a month in expenses such as utilities.
“How in the world as a nonprofit do we pay $3,000 a month?” Strauchon asked in her appearance before county commissioners.
The solution, she said, is to bring in enough other organizations who could share that cost.
The pantry leaders are hard at work on a campaign to raise money to buy the building. The sooner they can do that, they say, the sooner they can stop the $2,000 lease payments.
The Ford Family Foundation awarded a $3,200 grant for training in grant writing and to pay a grant writer.
The pantry leaders are in a new world when it comes to fundraising.
“None of us knows how to ask for cash,” Patton said.
They have learned that major foundations look for community support before considering whether to write six-figure checks.
“We need to show the community is behind us,” Strauchon said. “We need the community involvement.”
That was one reason for the pitch to the county commissioners, where pantry leaders asked for $2,000.
They’re creating a fundraising plan and looking for volunteers to help.
Meantime, they are planning an expansion of the building, pushing out one side by 20 feet to create more room for community meetings and for government agencies and nonprofits to operate. That remodeling won’t happen, though, until the pantry figures a way to buy the building.
To the leaders, a community service center seems vital for not only Vale but for the area. They note that half the pantry clients come from other Malheur County communities.
Such a center, the strategic plan summary says, would be “moving those in poverty towards trajectories of success” and making them “less dependent on nonprofit and government resources.”
CORRECTION: The Vale Food Pantry received a $3,200 grant from the Ford Family Foundation. An incorrect figure was provided earlier to the Enterprise.
CONTACT Editor Les Zaitz: [email protected].
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