Displaced food pantry settles into new neighborhood as food demand grows
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DENVER — Joy’s Kitchen operated as one of the few food pantries serving suburban Lakewood for more than a decade, until Westwoods Community Church forced the free grocery operation to vacate over the summer.
After a frantic search, Joy’s Kitchen found a new home in Denver’s Lincoln Park neighborhood near downtown, joining the ranks of at least eight food pantries and meal lines within a one-mile radius.
Kathleen Stanley, founder and director of Joy’s Kitchen, worried the organization wouldn’t have the same impact on the community in an area already dense with food services.
But five months at the new location have changed her mind.
“We’re not having any problem moving the food. The food definitely is needed,” Stanley said. “What I'm seeing is the need for a webbed network of services.”
Now, Stanley sees an opportunity to lessen the strain on neighboring nonprofits and offer something new to the neighborhood’s food insecure residents.
“Somebody said to me, ‘I can't believe you're open on Thursday nights. Everybody's open on Thursday nights.’ And then I realized we all should be open on Thursday nights,” Stanley said. “It gives us a better chance to reach the immediate area, and then also give less strain on the food banking system if we’re all open on a routine day.”
The food bank system is especially stressed now, as SNAP benefits remain up in the air even as the government shutdown is ending. SNAP is a federally-funded program to help low-income families afford groceries.
The clientele at Joy’s Kitchen’s new location still consists of many families, but Stanley said they reach more unhoused people than before.
Jeff Landis lives in his RV and often parks in the industrial area near Joy’s Kitchen. He said there wasn’t a convenient place for him to get food nearby before Stanley and her team of volunteers moved in.
“We’d just go out and scrap and make as much money as we can and go get our own stuff, so this helps out immensely,” Landis said.
Landis has picked up food from Joy’s Kitchen every week since it began services in Lincoln Park.
Joy’s Kitchen is unique because people can take home a box of groceries without filling out any paperwork or making an appointment. Customers line up, get a number and can shop when their number is called.
Denver Inner City Parish — less than a mile from Joy’s Kitchen’s new location — has served the neighborhood for decades with a similar market-style food pantry, where people can pick out their own food. No ID is required at DICP, though shoppers must schedule an appointment for a 15-minute window.
Appointments help reduce wait times, but they can be prohibitive to people who don’t have a phone or reliable transportation.
When it moved, Joy’s Kitchen became out of reach for some families in Lakewood, especially its unhoused customers and people without reliable transportation. But Stanley still sees a lot of familiar faces making the trip to the new location, including long-time shopper, Janaki Pryce.
Pryce has been shopping at Joy’s Kitchen since 2021. As a freelancer, Pryce doesn’t have a steady income and relies on the food pantry when work is slower and money is tight. Joy’s Kitchen is the only food pantry Pryce goes to.
“I like it more than other places due to the fact that I run into people I know there all the time here, which is cool, either doing volunteer work or people just trying to grab food,” Pryce said.
Both Pryce and Jeff appreciate that Stanley refers to Joy’s Kitchen as a “food rescue,” since it stocks its shelves with food that grocery stores would otherwise throw away.
Pryce misses the large outside waiting area Joy’s Kitchen had at its old location, but the new space — though the same size at 4,000 square feet — is easier to maneuver as a shopper.
The food pantry — which Stanley started in her kitchen 13 years ago — operates out of the warehouse for Benefits in Action, a healthcare nonprofit with locations across Colorado.
In collaboration with Benefits in Action, Joy’s Kitchen serves 4,000 to 6,000 families a month, about the same reach it had from its Lakewood location. The pantry hosts at least two distribution events a week and delivers more than 1,000 food boxes a month to seniors.
With a walk-in freezer and a loading dock, the warehouse space is more appropriate for food services than the basement at Westwoods Community Church.
But Stanley is concerned about how inclement weather, like snow and freezing temperatures, will affect the pantry’s accessibility for customers, who now wait on the largely-uncovered pavement behind the warehouse.
“I’m still faced with that problem of not enough space and no funding,” Stanley said.
Joy’s Kitchen relies on donations and does not receive government or grant funding. Stanley sold many of her own belongings to fund the food pantry’s move out of the church, where it used to operate for free.
The partnership with Benefits in Action provides the grassroots food pantry with much-needed logistical and infrastructure support.
“My hopes for the future are that I can adequately fund the collaborative project with Benefits in Action and Joy’s to be an example of how to move forward in these very trying times as a nonprofit,” Stanley said.
“It’s such a good example of what nonprofits can do to collaborate to still provide services without the federal funding.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.