JFCS Squirrel Hill Food Pantry Director, Jesse Sharrard, shares his perspective about the construction updates and progress.
“I had been working at the pantry for all four days when I got an email letting me know that an anonymous donor was interested in making a gift to help the pantry do something outside of our normal operating budget. Four days!
Somehow (with a lot of help from other folks within JFCS!) we put together a proposal identifying how the pantry was crunched for space: our aisles were too narrow for two carts to pass each other and when deliveries arrived, pallets were dropped adjacent to the shopping area, creating a hazard for clients who had to navigate around the stacks of food. By knocking down walls to reclaim some underutilized office space, we could create a safer space with wider aisles and more storage space. By opening a doorway from the retail space into the conference room, we could incorporate more volunteer groups into our efforts and hold informational sessions for our clients to learn about other resources in the community.
We received word before the end of April that our proposal had been accepted, which set off a year’s worth of planning: several rounds of architectural drawings helped us define how we wanted to use the space, helped us to imagine what else could be possible. Our staff took the inspiration to heart and started coming up with operational improvements to help us test our theories and make sure we were building the new space around concepts that would work, all the while tempering our expectations and thinking about the budget.
Then, in September, another angel donor appeared. Bea Leopold’s parents, Sam and Sylvia Goldstein, had lived for years just a couple of blocks from the pantry and always felt a great affinity for Pittsburgh. Her mother was a great cook, and food played a central role in how they shared their love with friends and neighbors, so a gift to help us provide food to families in need felt like the perfect way for her to honor their memories. This gift helped us complete our budget and really think big about what we could do.
Our ideas really started to take shape: a floor scale to weigh everyone’s groceries while they are in the cart (instead of having to unload everything, weigh it in batches, and load it back in again); a corral at the entrance to keep the shopping carts organized and where they are most needed; new flooring to replace the tiles that had become scuffed and broken through decades of wear and tear; new shelves to replace the ones that were being propped up by milk crates and held together by duct tape: we were going to be able to build a new & improved pantry!
We were incredibly lucky to find a contractor who understands the importance of what we do and who was willing to shift her schedule around to accommodate us. Renee Rosensteel of 15233 Properties built her proposal for the job around the promise of completing the bulk of the work from 4:00 PM -12:00 AM and on weekends, and she has lived up to that commitment. But even more impressive is that she has also been present at the pantry as early as 9:00 AM to make sure that our staff know what is happening and to help us sort through the disruptions that result from the quick progress her team makes when we’re not around.
Work started at the end of April and has been proceeding apace. Each week has brought challenges that our team has overcome, successfully meeting the simultaneous crunch of increased demand for our services (approximately double what we saw a year ago) and decreased space (as the walls and the shelves came down).
The closer we get to completion, the more excited I get about what we are building. The walls got painted over Memorial Day weekend, and the new color is bright and cheerful. The flooring will be replaced over Shavuot weekend, and shelves will go up soon thereafter. By July, we should have everything put back together and ready for our grand re-opening! It will be gratifying to invite our clients back into the new space, let them shop for themselves again, and have enough space for our staff, volunteers, and shoppers to all be able to move smoothly through the widened aisles, helping each other in our reimagined space.”
