From Church of the Good Shepherd:

We have exciting news from the East Mountain Food Pantry. An anonymous donor has stepped forward and is offering to purchase a building for the Pantry! If you have visited our current location, you know we are bursting at the seams, and have outgrown our current facility.

A building is currently under contract, and if a number of conditions can be met, EMFP will be moving from its current location in Tijeras to the top of Sedillo Hill (just six miles east of Tijeras).

The East Mountain Food Pantry is one of the many ministries that is sponsored by the Ministry of Justice and Community Interface at Church of the Good Shepherd. Last Thanksgiving we hosted the Gobble Challenge to provide Thanksgiving dinners for 130 families. And several of our members have volunteered at the pantry, helping with weekly food distribution.

Church of the Good Shepherd is also donating our old printer, copier, and filing cabinets to the pantry when they move into a larger facility. This will enable the pantry to provide better service to the clients.

As the pantry prepares to move, we hope to improve our current processes. With additional space, we also plan to acquire new refrigeration for food storage. We need a walk-in cooler so that we can store vegetables and fruit. Currently we lose a lot of the vegetables we receive because we cannot store them from week to week and end up having to set them out for local farmers to feed to their pigs and chickens.

We hope to move to a “Client Choice” Pantry model, where our clients are able to view and choose their cold storage and frozen foods. We are also looking to acquire reach-in refrigerators as well as a reach-in freezer.

Do you know anyone in the grocery or restaurant industry who may be upgrading their refrigeration and might be willing to donate their older models to the pantry? Please contact Marge Petersen or Mary Stuart if you have ideas of folks we might contact! Thank you.