Over 40 years ago, the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry was founded by a high school youth group at Grace Lutheran Church to help neighbors who came to the church office looking for assistance.The community need quickly grew beyond what Grace Lutheran Church could provide and more churches stepped in to help.Eventually 13 churches joined Grace, to become the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry we know today. Annually, the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry distributes more than 700,000 pounds of food to more than 30,000 individuals in DuPage County.
For more than 40 years, the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry has been housed in auxiliary space at Grace Lutheran Church in Glen Ellyn. This has been our first and only home, but now the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry is experiencing the essential need for a larger, independent space to serve the growing number of DuPage county residents facing food insecurity.
“The need for dedicated space is becoming critical to our day-to-day operations, increasing the urgency of our capital campaign.” says board member and capital campaign chair, Kim Dorn. For more than 40 years, the pantry has occupied space in Grace Lutheran Church in Glen Ellyn, grown from their original space of one room serving five communities to 5 rooms serving 11 communities.Our current overflow into additional space gives us certainty that we have outgrown our space at Grace Lutheran Church.
Thankfully, another community partner, Faith Lutheran Church of Glen Ellyn has donated the use of a former parsonage home to be used by the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry to carry out their mission of providing food to neighbors in need.This valued partnership with Faith Lutheran Church and shared mission, allows the pantry to expand to a larger, more fitting space, necessary to accommodate the increasing need in the DuPage community.The Glen Ellyn Food Pantry is currently raising capital to adapt the former parsonage home with appropriate interior space needed to sort, store, package and distribute groceries.
We are more than half way to our $900,000 goal, and we are reaching out to our community for your support.Please consider supporting the new home of the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry.
Questions? Email working4hunger@glenellynfoodpantry.org