Marblehead resident and longtime volunteer at the Marblehead Food Pantry Marcy Schwam has taken over the pantry from founder Janet Parker, who started the operation in 1991. Parker has retired.
Schwam started volunteering in 2014 during a Thanksgiving drive for the pantry.
“I’ve always had a belief that no one should be hungry or cold — plain and simple,” Schwam said.
Several years later, COVID threatened to close the pantry, but Schwam came up with an idea to serve people safely.
“I couldn’t accept that we’d have to close, so we came up with a way to keep it open,” she said.
Every Saturday, Schwam and another volunteer would go to the pantry and pack bags, up to 100 orders, and mark spots in the parking lot where clients could pick them up.
“It worked and allowed us to stay open and I think from that moment on, seeing how dependent the households that we serviced were was when I really took even more of an interest for those few years.”
Looking to the future, Schwam is hoping to find new storage space to make it easier for volunteers to transport food and restock the pantry. Right now, the pantry’s storage space is at the Masonic Lodge on Pleasant Street.
“We would love to be able to get a small storage space so that we could stock our backfill and just be able to bring it from one part of the building to here rather than have it (stored food)] be a mile away and have to load vehicles to bring it here. Also our storage area is not an adequate area. It’s in the basement of the building and it’s very old,” said Schwam.
“Fundamentally, a food pantry shouldn’t have to go to the food, the food should come to the food pantry. Unfortunately, our client base exceeds what our donations are in food at this exact moment. Hopefully within the next six to eight weeks, that will change. Hence the importance of the community knowing that the food pantry exists under new management and new procedures. So if we can get our backfill — and I’ll call it our warehouse— up to levels that are satisfactory, we’ll be able to shop less and just move food from our storage area to here.”
Preparing for the holidays
For the holiday season, the pantry is planning a new way to have the community donate.
“I will be asking all the places of worship within Marblehead to hold a more specific food drive. It might be assigning different parishes or congregations, ‘Can you be the coffee supplier?’ Because I believe that when the more specific we can be with our requests, the better the donations are because it’s very easy. When I go to the market this week, they’re looking for spaghetti sauce. I’ll pick up some extra spaghetti sauce.”
Currently the pantry serves about 80 households, with the most popular items being basic baking supplies like flour and sugar, as well as canned goods like beans or lentils.
If you are interested in volunteering or looking for more information on the pantry, visit marbleheadfoodpantry.org.
