Food pantry started with an act of kindness in North LIberty

You don’t know who Sandy Miller was but you should. Forty years ago, she started bringing food to First United Methodist Church in North Liberty, where she worshipped, and started a small pantry for people in need. Church leaders commended her for doing so and, according to the church’s history, established North Liberty’s Food Pantry in 1985.

Since then, that pantry has grown from a small, church-based mission to a partnership with the city of North Liberty and other civic groups into the North Liberty Community Pantry, at 89 N. Jones Blvd. The pantry has outgrown space in that spot next to the church, which moved to 85 N. Jones Blvd. 24 years ago.

You read in The Gazette last month about the need to expand the community pantry to a new location, at 350 W. Penn St., that can serve better people who come through its doors. The need to do so is real.

The pantry broke a single-month distribution record when it handed out 61,492 pounds of food in May, it reported in a mailing to supporters at the beginning of July. Four of every five families using the pantry say their trips there account for 20% of their food each week. Four years ago, that number was one of every five families, the pantry reported. The pantry had distributed 17,800 clothing items through May this year, three times the 5,800 items distributed just two years ago.

What you didn’t read in the news story is that the pantry grew from someone’s compassion for hungry people and how that compassion spread through a local church. Sandy Miller, who passed away some time ago, had little means but her heart was huge. She gave what she could to her church and to people in need.

Her giving infected others. A two-shelf pantry emerged in the church basement. Partnerships started with North Liberty First United Church groups — the youth group, for example, held a yard sale and car wash in 1991 to benefit the pantry. Other church members started distributing children’s clothing that year.

In 2000, when the church moved, its campus included a stand-alone building for outreach ministries that centered on a larger pantry. “The food pantry found a niche and was in business serving those in need,” the church’s history from 1841-2000 reads.

New partnerships with the city and other groups outside the church gave the pantry a true community mission of helping those in need of food and clothing. The pantry moved into its current, larger building on the church grounds in 2013. Even then, however, the growing number of people living with food insecurity 10 years down the road was easy to see.

Donations — some huge ones from caring resources — will be needed to go along with a $100,000 city grant for a facility estimated to cost around $3 million. Hopefully, efforts during a fund drive also can dig into the root causes that send people to North Liberty’s pantry, and others like it in Eastern Iowa, and put a dent in those causes.

But worth remembering will be how the pantry got to where it is today. One person, then a handful, then an armful, then a village, all of them seeds that have grown into a large, collaborating community that can accomplish a lot.

It had to start somewhere.

Lyle Muller is a retired, longtime Iowa journalist and former editor of The Gazette and the former Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism. He is a member of North Liberty First United Methodist Church and researching its history for updates.