“Urbana will continue to receive excellent service from dedicated professionals and volunteers at existing pantries,” said Ted Bergh, CEO of Catholic Charities Southeastern Ohio, Second Harvest’s parent organization, in a release. “It doesn’t make sense for food providers to be competing for donations and volunteers, and there are more effective ways we can serve the community.”
The food pantry will close its location at 122 Miami St., but will still provide a mobile food truck service once a month at St. Mary Catholic Church, said Keith Williamson, executive director of Second Harvest. The pantry was able to serve about 80 families in an hour, but the mobile truck can serve 200 families in two hours, he added.
Closing the food pantry will put more pressure on other emergency food services in the area, said Marilyn Cohn, director of Caring Kitchen, located at 300 Miami St.
Caring Kitchen offers a food pantry and soup kitchen, among other services. Cohn said the Second Harvest pantry closing will place a burden on Caring Kitchen — especially because they are within walking distance of each other.
“I disagree,” said Anna Plataniotis, director of development outreach at Second Harvest. “I think we were just providing duplicate services.”
“It could be possibly true,” Williamson said. “We’ve done some things to try to get more food to (Caring Kitchen) in case that happens.”
Catholic Charities gave food pantries in the community adequate notice of the closing, said Kelly Anchrum, the organization’s director of marketing and communications.
“Because at the end of the day, we really want to make sure that we’re able to serve the most people,” she said.
The food pantry closing is allowing Catholic Charities to improve its operations across all food bank locations, Anchrum said.
“If you look at Second Harvest, we serve people across Clark, Champaign and Logan counties, which represents about 4.5 million meals last year,” she said, “and we’re supporting about 73 non-profit agencies in that region, so we’re looking logistically at how we can serve more people.”
The Urbana food pantry’s staff has been moved to the Springfield location, so no jobs were cut, Anchrum added.
“We really are trying to make changes to improve our services so that we can serve more people,” she said.
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