Feeding South Dakota made its first official delivery of groceries Wednesday when its new mobile food pantry stopped at Valley View Heights in Rapid City, where many residents are elderly, low income or disabled.
The delivery was made possible after an anonymous donor from the Rapid City area gave the nonprofit a 2018 Dodge Ram 3500 truck and a 2019 Featherlite 30-foot enclosed trailer that was transformed into the mobile food pantry.
“People have needs, and we want to reach them,” Shawn Burke, development associate with Feeding South Dakota, said of the organization's new outreach effort.
The Valley View Heights neighborhood is in one of 13 areas of Rapid City where residents suffer the highest levels of food insecurity, meaning they lack consistent access to affordable, nutritious food.
Rapid City Collective Impact used a surveying and mapping process to identify the locations where people have difficulty accessing food because of several factors — low income, lack of transportation and long distances to the nearest grocery stores or other sources of nutritious food, according to Julie Oberlander, communications director for Rapid City Collective Impact.
Feeding South Dakota will take its mobile pantry to those neighborhoods once a month year-round, said Jennifer Stensaas, marketing and communications coordinator for Feeding South Dakota. The pantry is equipped to serve 80 people per stop. It meets American Disabilities Act requirements and is adaptable for people in wheelchairs and walkers.
At local food banks, people typically choose from whatever food is available, and food banks might provide recipients with an assortment of groceries that are already bagged or boxed. In the new mobile pantry, people can walk up and down an aisle, much like they were in a grocery store, to choose their food. Some items, such as produce, might be pre-bagged for convenience.
On Wednesday, more than 70 families registered and walked through the mobile food pantry, each choosing more than 30 pounds of food, according to Feeding South Dakota.
“People get to pick what they’re taking based on what they can prepare or their dietary needs,” Oberlander said. “It makes a difference in terms of their dignity. Giving people a say in what they’re getting is a neat thing.”
During a pilot program that went from April through September 2018, the Mobile Food Pantry Program served 5,365 people, nearly half of which were children. The distributions took place on one Saturday per month and provided more than 36,500 meals.
Feeding South Dakota is the state’s largest hunger relief organization. Last year, it distributed nearly 12.2 million pounds of food to more than 100,000 individuals.
