Be a member of The Feeding Team

By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com

The Reporter’s friends at The Feeding Team have six pantries ready to be delivered to new partners right now. If you are willing to join the fight against food insecurity FeedingTeam.org Co-Founder Lisa Hall is making it as easy as pie.

According to Hall, if you want a pantry placed on your property, all she needs to get started is the address and written permission from the property owner to put one there.

“Once I get that, then we start the research,” Hall told The Reporter. “What’s the demographic in that area? Do we have a pantry close by? Do we not? Even if we do, if there’s subsidized housing close by, it can house two pantries. Then I just need them to understand that they would need to take it on.”

FeedingTeam.org will not only deliver the pantry to your location, but also fill it the first time. After that, the responsibility for restocking the pantry will fall to your business or community organization.

“About four to five hundred meals will go into the first deployment,” Hall said. “Then they would be responsible for maintaining it. They just have to make sure there’s no perishables put in it, check it once or twice a week, mark through the UPC codes, and things like that.”

The UPC (Universal Product Code) is the barcode you or the ever-more-rare human clerk at a grocery store scans at checkout. The reason you need to mark through those codes before placing food in the pantries is because some people were scamming the pantry system.

“We ask people to do that because they ran into an issue,” Hall said. “We didn’t know it before, but the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department let us know that there’s some people who were taking items back to the grocery store trying to get money. If you mark through the UPC codes, they can’t take them back.”

After you or your business reaches out to Hall about hosting a pantry, if the demographics look like a good fit, she will be in touch to discuss the details. FeedingTeam.org will handle repairs, repainting, and if a pantry is damaged too much, replacement.

“Then they become part of the Feeding Team family,” Hall said. “We promote them on our social media. They’re on our Facebook page. They’re on our website.”

They will also get recognition in The Reporter’s pages when the pantry is installed and when we run a full list of local pantry locations as a public service.

The whole process from sending Hall the first email to getting your new pantry installed could take as little as two weeks, thanks in large part to Gaylor Electric, a FeedingTeam.org partner that helps with pantry deliveries.

Pantries can go outside a business, in shared spaces in subdivisions, at churches, and at other public locations, but they cannot go on private residential property. One well-intentioned person wanted a pantry at the end of their driveway at home, which was not an acceptable location.

There are some specific areas Hall would like to see new pantries installed.

“We’re trying to break into Tipton,” Hall said. “We can find volunteers. We’ve had people reach out that would love it if we had one up there. Tipton, Westfield, and Carmel need some more. I think we’re good in Arcadia, Cicero, and Fishers. We have six pantries that we’re looking to find a home for. Anyone who wants to host one can reach out to me at Lisa@FeedingTeam.org and we’ll get to work.”