The Christian Center’s mobile food pantry made its first stop of 2022 on Tuesday at the Iron Horse Park Apartments. The center uses a refrigerated truck to bring supplies to areas they know can use the extra food. Christian Center Executive Director Rob Harter says the center started the mobile pantries serving Park City and Heber City in 2020 when so many were hit hard financially by the pandemic. New this year, he says the service will be extended into Kamas and Coalville.
“Like you said, the Kamas pantry is closed,” Harter said. “We want to make sure people from there who often come to our food pantry don't have to drive all that way. And through a bit of research, we found that a lot of folks in Coalville or Kamas, it's really difficult for them to come to a food pantry here in Park City, or Heber for that matter, or they don't know about it. And so, we are working closely actually with the schools. And by offering these mobile food pantries directly with the landlords of some of these apartment complexes, in some of these locations we're going to, so that people are aware of it. And it's easy access. We just want to remove any barriers for people that need food.”
Harter says they have two mobile food pantry trucks with refrigerators and freezers on board. Volunteers help load up the trucks with prepared food and drive to different distribution areas. He says volunteers are always needed.
“We've had a lot of people that are interested in helping us with the mobile food pantries,” Harter said. “So, typically how you can help with, either load these trucks, as you mentioned, we use these wonderful trucks to get around. But then once we get there, we need to often help to unload, put them out on tables and help sort them out and actually hand them out and distribute them to families. So, we are looking for volunteers. If you're interested and would like to be part of these mobile food pantries, you can go to our website and go to our volunteer page and just mention mobile food pantries, and we'll get you connected.”
A schedule of food pantry locations will be posted on the Christian Center’s website.
The next stop for the mobile pantry is the Todd Hollow apartment complex near Hideout on April 26, then at the Aspen Villas Apartments in Prospector on May 10.
Registered volunteers meet at the Christian Center at 2 p.m. and spend 90 minutes preparing the food bags which are then distributed between 4:30 and 6 p.m. at the mobile pantry locations. The trucks will be in Coalville on May 24th and in Kamas on June 7th.
