Crystal Proulx arrived early for her shift on Monday, as she’s known to do, but only after stopping by the grocery store for cinnamon.
The Christ the King Food Pantry had an abundance of apples left over from the brief period it spent preparing food boxes for SNAP recipients during the government shutdown. Proulx, a mostly-retired dietitian, was determined to do something with the surplus.
By 6 p.m., a half-hour before the pantry opened to clients, a line had already formed on the porch. On the other side of the adjoining wall, Proulx hurried from the walk-in refrigerator to a folding table in the market space, where a spread of ingredients and printed recipes for oatmeal with cooked apples waited for her.
“I’m trying to look at things from a nutritional perspective for our clients and neighbors, as we call them, to see if we can feed somebody, then can we draw them toward better nutrition?” she said. “I can’t, for example, put out oranges and give a dissertation on vitamin C, but I can say, ‘If you take these oranges, maybe it’s going to help you so you don’t get a cold this winter because it might help your immunity.”
Proulx belongs to a core group of volunteers at the Christ the King Food Pantry who dedicate themselves to helping alleviate food insecurity in the capital region. While the pantry is open each evening on Monday through Thursday with different volunteers covering shifts, Proulx’s every-other-Monday group has been working together consistently for several years.
She and her counterparts extend a steady hand to all clients, new and old, who need the food pantry’s aid.
“This is different work from what I’ve done my whole life, but the connection I see is, I’ll call it ‘being in the trenches with people,'” she said. “We are doing very basic nutrition. We have people come to our pantry, and it’s very satisfying to know that when they leave, they will not be hungry tonight.”
The food pantry recently constructed a new, accessible facility and shifted to a client-choice model, allowing guests to walk through aisles as they would at the grocery store and pick food items themselves. These changes have given the pantry renewed visibility and drawn in new customers at a time of increased uncertainty around government-funded food assistance.
At the reception desk on Monday, Peter Sandberg prepared to welcome clients to the pantry, noticing with a glance that many of the evening’s early arrivals were new Americans. He planned to shuffle to the left of the desk’s tall front, which he felt impeded from greeting clients more personally, “almost like a wall.”
With each visitor, he wrote down their date of birth, the number of people in their family and their household income. Since clients are limited to one visit per week, he also kept track of how often people request the pantry’s help. Some engaged with him and shared their stories, others kept their heads down and made their way through the pantry quietly.
“It’s really that first impression, trying to make people feel welcome,” he said. “All these people have been dealt with a different hand in life, and some of us have come from loving families and have been able to continue that, and yet, you’ve got these people who have mental illness, homelessness, addiction — and they’re still people.”
On Monday, he hoped that a new queue system with numbered slips, like at a deli counter, would help keep the lobby orderly as, one by one, volunteers paired up with clients to walk them through the market area.
One of those volunteers, Sandberg’s wife and co-owner at Concord Awning & Canvas, Denise, chuckled about “Peter’s desk job” as she went about her own preparations.
When Denise was a child living in Long Island, NY, her grandparents offered up their basement as the hub for the St. Vincent de Paul Food Pantry in their town. She has a distant memory of stacking canned vegetables in that basement and helping her grandmother assemble bags of basic food items for people who needed urgent help.
Christ the King’s previous food pantry was a cramped, inaccessible house that stood where the new one currently resides. Clients picked up pre-packaged food boxes without a choice as to what they contained, so Denise made an effort to accept returns of whatever shelf-stable items a client didn’t use throughout the week, with “no questions asked.”
Now, she helps clients navigate the aisles, introducing them to unfamiliar brands and encouraging them to take what they need and would eat.
“You can tell that when people are at the pantry, a lot of them are stressed out,” she said. “If you have food insecurity, you probably have a host of other problems, financial insecurity, sometimes health issues, and it just all kind of piles on. I don’t think anybody really wants to go to a food pantry, so we always try to make them feel more welcome, like we are here to help.”
After the clock ran out on their shift and the volunteer group dispersed, Proulx and the Sandbergs said they, too, felt fed by the experience.
Making a difference provides a sense of purpose, Denise said.
“When you’re done for the evening, there’s still more need, but at least you know you’re doing something for that need, that you’re helping real people in your real community,” she added.
For Proulx, who lost her husband in March of 2019 and joined the food pantry to work through her grief about a month later, volunteering has infused her life with the joy of community.
“I always had a strong underlying faith that I could always fall back on,” she said. “My faith tells me it wasn’t by coincidence I ended up here.”