Jill Schramm/MDN Steve Streitz, right, shares thoughts during a small group breakout session on capacity building for food pantries at a meeting at The Lord’s Cupboard, hosted by Souris Basin Planning Council, Thursday. Others in the breakout session are, from left, Eric Locken, Gerald Roise and Paulette Streitz.

Local food pantry volunteers brainstormed ideas about how they might benefit from AmeriCorps VISTA assistance at a meeting on capacity building Thursday with Great Plains Food Bank and Souris Basin Planning Council.

SBPC, which plans to launch a statewide initiative to host a VISTA member who can assist food pantries, is gathering input from around the region on how to best structure a program. The hope is to support food pantries through volunteer engagement, resource development and strengthened community partnerships.

“”It’s hard to find a pantry where there are paid staff,” said Janice Tweet, Ending Hunger 2.0 director at Great Plains Food Bank. “The majority of the work that is happening in our communities to feed people is through volunteers, and even if there is one paid staff, we know that there are still many, many volunteers that are still making it happen in that facility.”

A Great Plains survey showed 58% of pantries lack enough volunteers and 44% report they don’t have enough money.

Another concern is the decreased donations coming through the Great Plains warehouse, Tweet said. Pantries are needing to purchase more from other sources.

“Those budgets really are about food. You’re not paying staff. You’re not paying high overhead. It’s really about raising money to be able to get food for neighbors,” she said.

Felicity Merritt, SBPC’s Economic Recovery Corps Fellow, said SBPC would like to find a VISTA member as soon as possible once finalizing the position details, which have been developed and are waiting to be tweaked based on pantry volunteers’ input. Bringing in a VISTA member would cost about $40,000 a year in stipend, subsidies and educational benefits, but it would be at no cost to the pantries.

Representatives of The Lord’s Cupboard and Our Lady of Grace food pantries were among about a dozen participants in Thursday’s discussion. Participants stressed the need for help with volunteer coordination and recruitment, such as a toolkit for local coordinators, as well as assistance with social media and other media management.

In 2024, Great Plains distributed almost 16 million pounds of food – up 19% from 2023 – through its 196 partner agencies across 100 communities in North Dakota. Tweet said that equates to more than 151,000 individuals receiving assistance, or one in five North Dakotans. About a third are children and 16% are seniors.

Tweet said Great Plains, which supplies food pantries in North Dakota and Clay County, Minnesota, for nearly two years has been sending about a million pounds of food a month from its warehouse into its pantry network.

“That just keeps going up. While we are extremely proud that we can move that food and that we have great partnerships throughout the state to move that food into each of your communities, we know that we don’t want the number to be rising, rising, rising. We want to be helping people to not need food assistance in the first place,” she said.