Food pantry manager wants people to choose what they eat

Nov. 27—Most people take grocery shopping for granted, but Devyn Santora knows that, for those who struggle to access food, getting to select items off shelves makes all the difference.

That’s why Santora, 30, does her best to make the Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program’s Brunswick food pantry look like a grocery store. There’s a meat counter, commercial glass-door refrigerators, grocery carts and a produce section. Guests can shop around — a change that was important to Santora.

When she started as the pantry manager six years ago, staff would decide what went in the cart for each visitor, and guests could only come every two weeks. During the pandemic, when the pantry became a drive-thru, options were even more limited.

“I knew that, when we moved back inside eventually, I didn’t want to go back to the system pre-COVID. I wanted to try to open up the space to the people. I wanted to try to make it lower-barrier, so you don’t have to ask people for help,” said Santora, who lives in Phippsburg. “You can just come in and be in charge of your own nutrition.”

Now, guests come from nine Maine counties to the pantry, which in September served more than 2,300 people.

About 20% of the food pantry’s guests are new Mainers, including asylum seekers who began arriving in Brunswick about three years ago. Santora tries to accommodate them by stocking foods important to their cultures, like cornmeal, and translating all materials into Spanish, French and Portuguese, as well as learning a bit of those languages herself.

“It’s so hard for me; I’m not a language-oriented human. But it felt really important to at least be able to say, ‘Hello’ to people and introduce myself to them and welcome them to our space in a language that isn’t English,” Santora said.

Heather Arvidson, the program’s director, said in a recent evaluation that she asked an oversight group why they thought the pantry was able to draw people from so far away.

“They listed the hours, they listed the quality of product, but they also said Devyn,” Arvidson said. “And that just really made me feel so good about the type of person we have running our food pantry, that when asked why someone would travel a distance to come, a lot of it is her, and the atmosphere she has created for people who are struggling.”

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