A Visit to the Hope for Life Pantry and its New Cooler

 It was one of those perfect New England autumn days when Individual Giving Manager Merry Renduchintala, Director of Communications Mark Cherrington, and Agency Services Coordinator Vinh Vuong visited the Hope for Life food pantry in Granby the other week. The pantry is the first of several partner programs to benefit from a grant given to Foodshare by BJ’s Charitable Foundation. The grant is intended to provide money for pantries and other partner programs to purchase needed equipment. In the case of Hope for Life, the equipment is a new cooler, which will have a substantial impact on the pantry’s services.

The pantry is housed in the basement of the Life Church and is run by the church’s pastor, Al Royal. Pastor Al has an interesting background: with degrees in engineering and management, he worked for 20 years in the corporate world, first as a management specialist for a major company, then through his own consulting business. During that time, he lived in eight countries and worked in thirty countries over the years. Then, in 2002, he was called to the clergy and founded Life Church, a nondenominational congregation, with his wife, Christine.

Pastor Al

Pastor Al is an enthusiastic man—enthusiastic about everything, but particularly about helping people in his community get the food they need. “I grew up very poor in inner city St. Louis,” he said. “We used to wait for the government truck to show up with milk and cheese, just to get by. When we first talked with the church board about the idea of having a pantry, people told me, ‘Granby has no need.’ That just isn’t true. When we started, there were eight families coming here. Now there are 30.”

As the need has grown, so has the pantry. Until recently, Pastor Al says, he was buying all his food at retail stores, and his budget was getting stretched very thin. Then he learned about Foodshare, and everything changed: “I was going to the store and spending $20 to get 10 boxes of cereal. I was pretty proud of myself, thinking that $2 a box was a really good deal. At Foodshare I got 120 boxes of cereal for a $23 handling fee. Because of Foodshare, we are serving almost three times as many people and giving away twice as much food, while spending less than we used to spend at stores.  We could never afford fresh produce before. Now we can.” 

Because of the much larger quantity of food Foodshare provides, the pantry has spread across four rooms: three storage rooms and one large space for serving clients. When people come in, they are given a form showing all the foods available that day, and they check off which ones they want. Then a runner takes the order back to the storage rooms and collects that food. But the existing refrigerators and freezers are crammed with food and spread across the three storage rooms, and it’s hard for the runners to know which refrigerator or freezer a given food item might be in. Thanks to the BJ’s grant, the new cooler, which can also be converted to a freezer, will solve that problem, consolidating all the food in one place, speeding up service to the clients, and making space for far more perishable food for clients.

Part of improving the service to clients is moving to later hours of operation, starting at 4:30. “With our new hours, we can serve working people,” Pastor Al says. “On Wednesday nights, it’s packed; people rush over here from work. And we leverage our facility to minister to all of the needs of the people.  It’s a very comfortable environment in here: we have music, and people will sit here and talk.  We have grief counselors; we have a staff to help people find jobs.”

You might think that with all this good work, Pastor Al might rest on his laurels. But in fact he spends his one day off volunteering with Foodshare. “I volunteer on the Foodshare meat truck,” he says. “We’ll pick up 160 coolers of meat each day!  People ask me why I do this, and I tell them it’s my way of giving back. We are so blessed in this country, but yet people go to bed hungry. And we are throwing away filet mignon and T-bone steaks. It’s criminal. I share this all with everyone, and I think people are finally getting a real appreciation of what Foodshare does. When I first experienced it, I cried, because now we can get food on the table of hungry people.”

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