Residents of Brookfield and beyond were invited to tour the Share Food Share Love food pantry’s facility, including its waiting room, main distribution center and backroom storage, to learn about its operations on Sunday, April 19.
Volunteers took turns leading attendees through a tour of the building at 9030 Brookfield Ave., answering questions and describing the process that neighbors in need go through when they attend distribution days on Tuesdays from 7-9 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon.
The tour began in the front room, where neighbors take numbered tickets from a deli-style ticket dispenser, with board member Michael Dieter. He explained the pantry’s 10-year history, from its birth in the basement of Faith Lutheran Church in 2015 to the creation of its Resource Hub connecting people with assistance outside of access to food — namely to healthcare and housing help — and its Families First program in recent years.
Take a tour
Dieter said about 40 people attended the event Sunday afternoon, which cost the pantry only $10 to put on, for the purchase of balloons and ice for refreshments. He said the pantry served more than 840 families last year while about 125 families made use of the Resource Hub.
After stopping in the waiting room, attendees walked through the grocery-style distribution room, which carries food, paper goods and miscellaneous items on shelves, with volunteers Jess Tamburello and Lynda Evans.
Tamburello said signs around the room describe how many of each item someone from a family of four or fewer people would be encouraged to take. Larger families have larger baseline numbers, she said, though ultimately there are no constraints on what someone may take due to the pantry’s focus on neighbor dignity and choice.
“I’ve been volunteering about three or four years now,” said Tamburello, whose husband, Joe, also volunteers. “Our kids are a little bit older, and I realized they don’t really need us to help them with things … We needed to figure out what that give-back to the neighborhood was. I was like, ‘How have we not figured out that this is at the end of our street?’”
She said friendships she’s developed with the other volunteers are what’s kept her coming back to give her time on Tuesday nights.
Evans said about three-quarters of the pantry’s food is provided by the Greater Chicago Food Depository, of which SFSL has been an affiliate since 2010. The rest of its inventory, including all of its personal hygiene and home cleaning products, comes from grocery store partners in the area, donation drives run by the community and direct donations from individuals, she said.
The pantry’s focus on client choice decreases its food waste by about 40% compared to if it was more stringent about who took what, Evans said. The pantry allows neighbors to take what they want or know they’ll eat while leaving items they won’t for the next person and informally restricts quantities based on remaining inventory, she said.
Families First
Then, attendees had a chance to speak with the director of the Families First program, who asked to be anonymous due to privacy concerns. She played an important role in creating the pantry’s Families First program last year that provides neighbors with items like diapers and formula for babies and tampons and pads for people who menstruate.
“We had these products in a very limited supply that people would donate … We’d have very few, select sizes, and very few packages of them, and they would be tucked away in the back because we didn’t have somewhere in the pantry,” she said. “If you knew we had those things, then you could ask for them … but if you didn’t know to ask, there wasn’t the opportunity.”
Since its implementation in July, the director said the program has proven its own necessity again and again due to the compounding negative effects for a family who cannot afford to access these products.
“There’s data that shows if you sit in a diaper for too long, that can lead to rashes or other issues with the child, even if it’s unintentional, which then leads to medical bills … and the same thing with women. If you use pads for too long, that leads to [urinary-tract infections] and other feminine issues,” she said. “Our internal data very much supports all of those statistics.”
She said the pantry gives away about 2,500 individual menstrual pads each month, not to mention the other products available through the program.
“Pretty much every person who experiences menstruation is going to use those products,” she said.
In an email to the Landmark, she said the pantry gave away 25,476 individual menstrual products and 9,516 diapers since the program started through the end of March.
End it out
Finally, volunteer Joe Tamburello, who manages the pantry’s volunteer staff, walked attendees through its storage room in the back, where shelves upon shelves of food from the GCFD and direct donations sit and wait for their turn at distribution.
“We basically go through everything. We check the dates, make sure everything’s safe to repurpose and send back out,” he said.
“This right now is organized chaos; I like to say that, but if you caught us two or three months ago, it would have been over the top. All those crates would have been full of stuff,” he added, pointing to the tops of shelves and other empty spaces.
As the volunteer coordinator, Tamburello said he keeps records of service hours for volunteers who need them and tracks who volunteers are and how recently they worked a shift in a database, from which the data helps the pantry apply for grants. He said there are more than 500 names on the list now, though that includes anyone from weekly volunteers to people who showed up just once.
He said interacting directly with neighbors in need, some of whom then turn around and volunteer their own time at the pantry, is the most gratifying part of the work.
“Two months into us volunteering, my wife and I, it was a Tuesday night, and we were about ready to wrap up. Another family comes through; it was an older gentleman and his wife. The two of them were making their last rounds, about ready to leave the pantry, and I look over at the gentleman, and he’s teary-eyed and emotional,” Tamburello said. “He goes, ‘This is the first time I’m going home to a full fridge in six months.’ That kind of stuff keeps me coming back. It really does.”
