Norwich food pantry asks for help as grant money runs out

Demand at St. Vincent de Paul Place has soared without more resources

Norwich — The administrators of the St. Vincent de Paul Place food pantry are asking for help keeping the shelves full as its 2018 grants have started to dwindle before the winter holiday season giving instincts kick in.

Demand at the food pantry, which is supported by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Norwich, steadily has gone up in the past decade, from about 6,000 annual visits to more than 15,500 this year.

That’s about 100 households, or 300 people, per day, food pantry manager Daniel Lamphere said.

“We’ve more than doubled” the number of families the food pantry serves since Lamphere started working there as a volunteer in 2007, he said. “Our need has gone up and up and up.”

St. Vincent de Paul accepts residents of any town that meet certain income qualifications, making them a more lenient and attractive option for hungry families over food pantries with more restrictive rules, Lamphere said.

A move into a new building on Cliff Street — and the media coverage of the move — may have drawn more people to the food pantry but Lamphere said he thinks local need for food resources is the main factor driving people there.

And the need has gone up without more resources to pay for more food. The pantry has the same budget and gets about the same amount of food from donations and from the Gemma E. Moran/United Way Labor Food Center as it did several years ago.

This year, as the number of families visiting the center has gone up 12 percent to date over last year’s attendance, Lamphere said the food pantry has been relying on donations and grants to pay for food to offer at the pantry. But any grants it received at the beginning of 2018 have dried up in the face of the higher demand, and the increased donations that usually come with the winter holiday season won’t begin for several months.

The pantry managers now are pulling from St. Vincent de Paul Place’s operational budget to keep the shelves stocked, though that’s not a sustainable solution, Lamphere said.

“I think right now we’re pulling from internal funds, which are always slim,” he said.

Donations usually pick up in November as people get in the winter holiday spirit or start to arrange their end-of-year giving but Lamphere said the food pantry will be struggling before then to keep enough food on the shelves.

He said he put the word out on the St. Vincent de Paul website and social media pages to encourage people to consider helping with a donation of nonperishable food items or money.

“I just like to let people know that demand is constant,” he said. “It’s not like a horrible spike out of nowhere, it’s just a ... increasing thing.”

“I just like to let people know that demand is constant.” ST. VINCENT DE PAUL PLACE FOOD PANTRY MANAGER DANIEL LAMPHERE