Volunteers at the Pierce County Food Pantry in Rugby prepare for a distribution on March 17.

When Vonnie Degenstein announced at a Rugby City Council meeting in August of last year her intention to retire as the director of the Pierce County Food Pantry after 34 years, the news came with the unfortunate caveat that she had been unable to find a worthy successor to fill her role.

Degenstein was essentially the lone board member of the pantry, a 501c3 nonprofit, and said she hadn’t found anyone interested in taking over the reins. When the city council indicated it would take action to keep the food pantry active, Degenstein cautioned that it wouldn’t be as simple as finding one lone person to fill her shoes.

“It would have to be more than one person because one person couldn’t do it. It needs to be multiple people,” Degenstein said. “It’s going to be hard to give up. It’s been a part of my life for so long.”

The city council set to work in the following months to get a plan in place to secure the future of the food pantry, which benefits more than 40 families in communities across Pierce County. The council first sought individuals interested in forming a new board, which was required to implement clear succession plans to avoid the vacuum of leadership created by Degenstein’s retirement.

The pantry’s board is made up of Chair Stacey Atkinson, Secretary Zachary Broadwell, general members Jody Tuchscherer and Deb Black, and student member Madeline Hurly. Even in her retirement, Degenstein is serving as vice chair temporarily to help everyone get up to speed.

“When I stepped up to help, through some discussion we found some other people willing to join the board. We want to learn as much as we can from her, because I’m still pretty new to this position. But we made it through the holidays. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on in the holidays,” Atkinson said. “We’ve been working together so that when she does choose to phase out, she will be comfortable knowing that everything will be handled with the care she gave it.”

Additionally, the council heeded Degenstein’s belief that the pantry’s former location in the National Guard section of the Rugby Armory didn’t provide enough privacy and ease of access to the pantry’s clients and identified several rooms in the armory that weren’t being used that could be more suitable. The council appropriated more than $10,000 to remodel the rooms, the doors and the electrical fixtures to accommodate the pantry’s three deep freezes used to store meat. In addition, new metal shelves and two tables were donated from the old hospital, and another table was donated by council member Jon Nelson.

“We had a little room by the kitchen, and on distribution day we put tables out in the hallway. We had people come to utilize the gym, and it was just very congested,” Atkinson said. “They actually cut a hole in the concrete block in the hallway so we would have a separate entrance away from everything else. Now when we have distributions, clients use the front door of the armory, and it’s very private even when the gym is being used.”

Atkinson said the transition to the new location was completed in time for the first distribution in January after the space was ready, which she found, “so much more functional.”

“Vonnie’s volunteers are extremely loyal. When the time came to move everything to the new room from the old room, we had more volunteers than we knew what to do with. It ran so smoothly. It was about a four hour project,” Atkinson said. “When we left that day, it was so heartwarming to know we had gotten all that done with the help of our volunteers.”

The new location also allows the pantry to return to having distributions between 4-6 p.m., which Atkinson said makes it easier for people to stop by after work. Atkinson said the pantry also has acquired a laptop to bring its bookkeeping into the 21st century, obtained a post office box to receive mailed food donations and created an email address.

Atkinson said she had previously volunteered to help with distributions from the Great Plains Mobile Food Bank and jumped at the opportunity to play a role with the PCFP after the mobile food bank ceased distributions.

“She started a very wonderful thing 30 years ago and single handedly ran it. The need now is even greater than it was 30 years ago just with the cost of everything,” Atkinson said. “The more visibility we have, the more we’ll reach people who don’t know about us or don’t know how to contact us.”

Food donations can be mailed to P.O. Box 123 in Rugby, and the pantry can be contacted at pc_foodpantry@hotmail.com.

“Rugby has been very supportive of this whole thing. It takes a lot of people to come together to make something like this happen. With Vonnie doing this on her own all this time, I couldn’t even imagine. As a community, we are very fortunate to have as many willing and helpful and lovely volunteers to make this all work, because we really do need everybody,” Atkinson said.