A clinic for the hungry

If you walk inside the former Aurora Medical Clinic off Highway 33 on Port Washington’s far west side, you would be hard pressed to recognize it.

Gone are the reception area, the multiple hallways and the small patient rooms. In their place are spacious areas flooded with natural light.

“It looks quite different,” Steve Hansen, president of the Food Pantry Inc. board of directors, said.

It should. The Port Food Pantry purchased the 16,000-square-foot building late last year and has been working feverishly ever since to transform the space into its new home.

The pantry had hoped to open right about now, but an unexpected setback in the form of a sprinkler system that failed has pushed the opening to Oct. 25.

“If it weren’t for that sprinkler system, we’d be moving in today,” Hansen said, noting it took seven weeks just to figure out a solution to the problem of pinprick leaks that caused flooding in the building. 

“We need a month-and-a-half to get everything ready. We’re really excited about this. We anticipate no down time when we do move. We’re getting our volunteers lined up now.”

The pantry will operate out of its current home in the basement of St. Peter of Alcantara Catholic Church on the city’s north side through Oct. 21.

Some things will be moved to the new building starting Oct. 13, but the big move  will be on Oct. 22 so the pantry can open as usual on Oct. 25, Hansen said.

“We might not be organized in the back but we will be upfront,” he said.

In the meantime, despite the fact work  on the building is continuing, pantry officials are giving tours of the new facility to their volunteers and the organizations and churches that support it.

“I think everybody’s excited about this,” Hansen said. “We’ll have space to move. People won’t be bumping into each other all the time.

“This is a lot more inviting, and a much better environment. There’s a lot of natural light, and there’s not one step in this entire space.”

Clients will enter the front door and stop at a registration desk, then proceed to a food area that will resemble a grocery store, where they can select their food and put it in a shopping cart, Hansen said.

One wall will eventually have a walk-in cooler and freezer — a purchase that will have to wait due to the sprinkler issue. 

A large clothing room, complete with custom shelving, is next to the food area.

“We will actually have places to store clothes now,” Hansen said, noting that until now the pantry would have to donate clothes in the off season because it had no where to put them.

Those front spaces alone total about 2,000 square feet, Hansen said, while the entire food pantry today takes up about 3,000 square feet.

The pantry will also have a teaching kitchen where volunteers can hold cooking classes and an adjoining space that will be a volunteer break room that will double as a meeting room.

There are spaces out of the public eye where food can be sorted in the back of the building, a cool room where produce such as potatoes and onions can be kept and spaces where volunteers can put together birthday packs for the pantry’s youngest clients.

There is room for the Gift a Child program at Christmas — last year, the pantry provided presents for 243 children — and space to house the Backpacks for Kids school program.

There’s even space for offices.

There’s also another 6,000 square feet that is undesignated. Hansen said they’re considering what the best use of that space is, whether that be renting it to another nonprofit organization or some other purpose.

The new building is on 4.3 acres, so there’s plenty of room outside for the pantry to grow. Hansen said there’s talk of creating a teaching garden or a garden to supplement the pantry’s offerings.

The renovations to the building have cost more than $500,000 so far, and it cost the pantry $900,000 to buy the building, all paid through fundraising, and Hansen said with the exception of the sprinkler work the project has come in under budget.

But due to the sprinkler issue, they will be holding another fundraising campaign. This time, they will ask people to contribute to specific projects and areas of the building, such as the scales to weigh the food.

The bulk of the construction work is completed, Hansen said.

“Now it’s finishes, punch list items,” he said. “It needs a really good cleaning. We have to assemble some things.”

And they plan to hold a rummage sale. Hansen noted that the pantry has reused or plans to sell many of the things from the building, including sinks, doors, cabinets and more than 200 chairs from the offices and waiting area that are currently stacked in a room. 

Hansen said everyone working on the project has shared the pantry’s vision.

“Everybody’s been really good to us — the city, the contractors, the sub (contractors),” he said. “They see the mission. Some of them did work on their own time.”

The new building is more visible and accessible, and Hansen said that may mean the pantry’s client base expands.

Last year, he said, the pantry distributed 220,000 pounds of food, an average of about 20,000 pounds a month.

At its peak, it helped 150 clients a month, he added, noting that a client is defined as a family of three to eight people.

“We think we’re going to beat that this year,” Hansen said. “We might have to be open more days.”

But, he added, the new facility should last the pantry well into the future.

“We should be good for 50 to 100 years,” he said. “We can do a lot here.”