About Us
Mission
Our mission is to help alleviate food insecurity in our community one family at a time by providing them with one week’s worth of emergency groceries. At the same time, our goal is to address the root causes of food insecurity by providing our clients with health, education, employment, and social services information and referrals.
-
The Wesley Food Pantry was the first food pantry in the community to offer evening pantry hours. The Eastern Illinois Foodbank contacted the Church to inform them of the need of a pantry with evening hours. Pantry clients who worked during normal business hours needed a pantry that they could visit after work.
-
The Wesley Food Pantry is a Choice model pantry. Clients are allowed to choose the food items that best suits their families needs. We do not distribute prepacked grocery bags unless the clients request them.
-
The Wesley Food Pantry seeks to go beyond combating hunger. We also strive to address the roots causes of food insecurity by providing our clients access to a variety of social service agencies that provide information and referral services. We invite social service agencies to be present during distribution hours so that clients who work, can still access these services.
-
The Wesley Food Pantry also recognizes the importance of childhood literacy and therefore gives children 2 books to take home with them. We give out over 100 children's books every Third Thursday of the month. We believe education is important to future success.
History
In the fall of 2006, the Eastern Illinois Foodbank informed Wesley church members that there was an urgent need for a food pantry in Champaign County that offered emergency food during evening hours in order to serve the community better. In response to this need, three church members started the Wesley Evening Food Pantry, which is now open the third Thursday every month from 5pm to 7:30pm. The first day the pantry opened we served 5 people; we now provide food to an average of 1000 people every month.
In the fall of 2013, the Wesley Food Pantry opened a second location at Parkland College to help serve struggling students. In the fall of 2014, the Parkland Pantry was opened to the public. It is open on the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month from 10am to 12pm and the 2nd and 4th Wednesday from 11am to 1pm and 4pm to 6pm. The hours were chosen so that students and working people would have an opportunity to visit the food pantry.
Our Team
In November 2014, Wesley Food Pantry welcomed a group of new staff dedicated to making the pantry as strong as possible and tasked with overseeing an expansion of the Wesley Pantry at Parkland. Meet them below.
