Food for thought
Food for thought
St. Philip’s food pantry opened in 2014 to address the gap that food deserts have left in South Dallas. Now, after success at St. Philip’s, North Texas Food Bank is trying to expand and bring help to other areas.
Kids run down the aisles as their parents pick up canned soup and fresh foods from the top shelf and place it in their cart.
It’s almost closing time, and all the customers start to rush to the checkout lanes. One by one, the employees bag all the food and send the customers on their way. Some of the employees even help customers to their cars.
But something’s different at this store. Whether it’s a family of five or a single adult, one thing holds true.
Nobody’s paying a single cent.
The St. Philip’s food pantry serves roughly 1500 families in the South Dallas food desert, where there are nowhere near as many grocery stores as there are in North Dallas. Although the site is run by only two employees with the help of a few volunteers, organizers of the larger St. Philip’s School and Community Center like Chief Philanthropy Officer Anyika McMillian-Herod make big contributions to ensuring the success of the pantry.
“We really are working to provide a service in this food desert community,” McMillian-Herod said. “The community where we are located is considered a food desert, so we’re really trying to address the hunger needs of our neighbors through our community pantry.”
The food pantry is a collaboration between organizations like the St. Philip’s School and Community Center, In the City for Good, the City of Dallas, Kroger, Dallas County, The Real Estate Council and Trammell Crow Company. But the biggest contributor to the pantry besides St. Philip’s itself is North Texas Food Bank (NTFB).
“Our community pantry is the first time they have operated a pantry, a client choice pantry,” McMillian-Herod said. “We started this collaboration with them about four years ago, and it has been so successful that now the North Texas Food Bank is opening other pantries in other communities in the DFW area that are also designated food deserts.”
St. Philip’s will completely take over the day-to-day operations of the food pantry once NTFB moves on to start pantries elsewhere. Since St. Philip’s can only cover a small amount of the area that needs a community pantry, McMillian-Herod believes that NTFB’s expansion will be beneficial for the people that St. Philip’s can’t help.
“That’s their plan now,” McMillian-Herod said. “Go to other communities, open these pantries, operate them for a while and hand it over to the organizations to manage. And open more and more and more.”
In 2017, 70,000 pounds of food were distributed by the pantry. Not only does St. Philip’s regularly harvest fresh food from its community aquaponics garden, but it also collects food from donations through food drives held in churches and contributions made by other organizations.
“We accept donations of canned foods and fresh foods from other organizations as well for this pantry,” McMillian-Herod said, “but I would say about 50 percent of the food in the pantry is secured through the North Texas Food Bank.”
The biggest problem the pantry faces is their lack of assistance. There are a few volunteers who consistently help out at the pantry when they’re available.
But there aren’t always enough to make the process go by smoothly and timely.
“We really only have two people staffed to operate the pantry,” McMillian-Herod said. “And on days that we are serving clients, we need seven to ten volunteers to facilitate an effective process of coming in, shopping, checking in, checking out and helping them to their car.”
When St. Philip’s first started its pantry, there was no physical space. It started as an effort to bag up food and hand it out to the people who would line up every week no matter what because they had no other options. Over time, the food pantry has developed into a successful organization that will continue to feed the people of South Dallas.
“The pantry is more sophisticated,” McMillian-Herod said. “It’s more dignified. It really is set up like a grocery store. To see that we’ve been able to grow and secure better resources to meet this need of food as a community has been really exciting and rewarding.”