With the start of the new year, many people’s minds naturally go toward the formation of resolutions to work toward a better path. Administrators from Brookfield’s Share Food Share Love food pantry are no exception.
“We’ve had some incredible growth in every way: donations, people coming in, clients, and general interest has been growing so rapidly. I wouldn’t say we’re going to take a step back; we’re going to take kind of a pause in ’26 and make sure our organization, the infrastructure, is set up in such a way that we can tackle that growth more,” said John Dumas, the pantry’s administrative director. “This past year, all the things that happened, all the stuff with the change in [presidential] administration, affected us in so many different ways that we’ve been putting out fires … We need a chance to make sure that we’re setting ourselves up properly for the future.”
He said some of the changes to come in 2026 will be guided by the experiences of the neighbors in need who visit the food pantry and what they say would help them most.
“We want to engage more with them, creating, maybe, a neighbor advisory board, having more discussions with the folks who come in to say, ‘How can we serve you? What do you need? What aren’t we doing? What can we do better?’” he said. “Instead of saying, ‘People need this,’ we need to say, ‘What do you need?’”
A neighbor advisory board might not be the only internal team that is introduced. Dumas said the pantry also wants to create a team responsible for nutrition and educating clients so they can make healthy food choices during their visits.
“Not that we want to only offer food that is highly nutritional in value but to give them that choice. People want to have a cupcake now and then; we don’t want to deny them that. We don’t want to say, ‘Hey, we got nothing but health food here,’” he said.
Instead, the goal would be to better label food items to inform neighbors of their nutritional content and encourage healthier selections. Dumas said the pantry’s aspiration also extends to education on how to cook using the items a neighbor might collect from a visit to Share Food Share Love.
He said he also wants to see the pantry’s physical stores be organized more effectively in the wake of a record-level donation surge in November and December.
“We redid the front and turned it into the grocery store, but the back storage areas have never been addressed,” Dumas said. “We were blessed with so many donations this year, more than we thought, and so we got caught off-guard as to how we were storing things. We don’t have an overabundance of food, per se — it’s not like I’m saying we don’t need food — but when we were getting these large donations, there was a challenge as to where we were going to put them. That shouldn’t happen because we have a large space, and it was just not organized for that.”
John Barnett, the pantry’s marketing and communications director, said he wants to see Share Food Share Love measure its success differently from other groups.
“There are over 60,000 food pantries in this country. They’ve been distributing food for decades, very often measuring their performance in terms of volumes of food distributed. That’s a hard model for food pantries to get away from talking about, but we need to, because that emphasis is on the efficiency of distribution. It’s not on the customer’s point of view,” he said. “What I’m proud of, I think we’re all proud of, is the fact that, from the beginning, we instinctively knew that what we’re about is not food distribution but food sharing.”
He said the difference is exemplified in a new promotional video that is available on the food pantry’s web page and shows six neighbors’ perspectives on visiting the pantry.
“What’s happening there is not about us. It’s about raising the voices of those who need to be heard in our community, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in circumstances where they need help,” he said.
Barnett said he and other pantry staff are proud of their achievements from 2025, including the creation of a resource hub with digital and in-person resources for neighbors who need assistance with more than just food. Share Food Share Love also instituted its Families First program, which provides access to free products for babies, like diapers, wipes and formula, as well as to menstrual products.
Barnett and Dumas agreed that 2026 is another year for the food pantry to not just address the symptom of food insecurity but to also work toward addressing its root causes.
“Thousands of people stepped up, compelled and motivated by what we had to say about our neighbors in need. That speaks to the fact that we are also facing a unique responsibility as a food pantry, which is that we have the opportunity to organize at a community level, to influence more endeavors to truly address the causes of hunger,” Barnett said. “Food pantries continue to follow the cycle of just pushing food out the door. It’s a noble thing. It certainly is alleviating hunger, but it’s not ending it.”
