Sciara has several medical issues that prevent her from working full time.
"I have Crohn's disease, and I also have some other issues where it is really hard for me to hold a job," she said. "I'm a single mother and work part time at home."
The Wheaton pantry serves 2,000 families a month. Ken Madden, the food pantry director at People's Resource Center, said the pantry was revamped in order to provide a better experience for clients, volunteers and staff.
That includes a new and improved layout.
"Before, our clients would come in, they would go to our walk-in freezer and they would go out the door," Madden said. "That didn't work for us because we carry a lot of food from local vendors. And they would be coming in the same direction that the clients were going. There was a lot of bumping up against each other."
With the new layout, clients are given a shopping cart – which is color-coded to reflect the size of their household – and then they go shopping in the new configuration, which is S-shaped. Each area is now labeled so clients can know how many items they can take based on their household's size, Madden said.
"We're recognizing that bigger households may need more food than we were giving out," he said.
