Extended hours will help food pantry serve more

Group aims to raise $1M to go toward buying property.

A new food pantry on the South Side of Columbus that opened Thursday is part of a pilot program that local officials and advocates will be monitoring closely.

The All People’s Fresh Market at 945 Parsons Ave. will be open 28 hours a week from Tuesday through Saturday. Many food pantries have more limited schedules, so this gives people more access to the pantry when needed.

“It’s a great test for us, a new model,” said Matt Habash, executive director of the Mid-Ohio Food Bank, which will be supplying the pantry. “It’s available when people need to access it.”

“The need is great, (in) one of our high-need areas,” he said.

The market, which used to be the German Village Drive-Thru, will be operated by the nonprofit Community Development For All People, which has been running a smaller food pantry across the street.

That pantry served 10,000 different people in 2017. “We anticipate that number doubling,” said the Rev. John Edgar, executive director of Community Development For All People. The new pantry will be 2,000 square feet, more than double the size of the former location, and will provide free produce, bread and dairy products.

Edgar said 20,000 pounds of produce will be delivered to the pantry each week. The goal is to provide healthy food to the community, and “it’s expensive to eat healthy.”

“We’ve run this for a number of years. This is an opportunity to take it to another level,” Edgar said.

The pantry will be open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. Habash said he hopes the longer hours encourage more people to use the pantry. He said 36 percent of the people who use pantries come just once a year. “They don’t want to go to a food pantry,” he said, because of the stigma.

The plaza outside the pantry store will have food trucks and exercise classes, Edgar said.

The nonprofit Parsons Avenue Redevelopment Corporation worked with the Columbus Next Generation Corporation to acquire the building for $275,000 and lease it to Community Development For All People. Brian Higgins, who leads the Parsons Avenue group, said the location makes it easy for people to find the market.

“I never thought drivethrough carryouts were a positive asset (for) the community,” he added.

Edgar said his group has raised $300,000 of a $1 million goal to go toward buying the new pantry property, as well as the renovation of a bike shop his group runs and the mortgage of his group’s headquarters building on Parsons. Edgar’s group plans to eventually buy the property from a limited liability company that Columbus Next Generation formed.