The Rexburg Mobile Food Pantry has the mission to bring more food into the Madison County area to those in need. Once a month, the mobile food pantry sets up to distribute food to the community. Typically, they can be found at Madison High School every third Monday, but for February their distribution date will be this Friday, due to President’s Day.
Food pantry organizer Jess Goudy says the mobile food pantry distributes food to around 650 families each month.
“The truck comes, drops off about 50,000 pounds of food on pallets, and we unload it, we sort it, we get it ready to distribute,” Goudy said. “And in a matter of four to five hours, all of that food is gone and distributed and there's just a stack of pallets left.”
The food is provided and delivered by the Idaho Food Bank, but all labor is provided by volunteers.
“It runs off of donations, people's donations of time, people's donations of box cutters and garbage bags and hot chocolate,” Goudy said. “Otherwise, that comes out of our volunteers' pockets, and we hate adding that kind of stress onto people who are already donating so much of their time to us.”
Each monthly distribution event needs between 75-100 volunteers to have operations run smoothly. Volunteer numbers are one of the challenges the food pantry faces monthly.
“December, everybody wants to get out and serve, and in December they're lighting the world, and I'm excited that they're lighting the world,” Goudy says. “We will have 250 volunteers, but then January will go from that to 45. The consistency of getting the right amount of volunteers out there to make that program run. Because when volunteers don't show up, the people there to get food are waiting so much longer and it just has a big effect.”
The Rexburg Mobile Food Pantry does not have a permanent location, although Goudy hopes the organization will be able to find storage opportunities to ease the burden on their volunteers.
Information on the Rexburg Mobile Food Pantry’s distribution times, volunteer opportunities, and more can be found on the Rexburg Mobile Food Pantry community Facebook group.