SEQUIM — The food pantry is gearing up to provide nourishment to more people.
Starting June 15, the Sequim Food Bank at 144 W. Alder St. will add to its weekly schedule: It will be open to clients from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. every Monday, said Nina Fatherson, executive director of the pantry for the past 27 years.
Through those years, Fatherson has provided fresh produce, milk, eggs, bread and myriad nonperishable foods to families and single people on Monday and Fridays from 9 a.m. to noon.
The pantry still will be open on those two mornings, and Fatherson, with her volunteers, will continue assembling boxes of food for the dozens of people in need.
“There are a lot of working people who can’t make it in there during those hours,” said Stephen Rosales, president of the food bank’s board of directors.
He’s talked with such would-be clients during his volunteer shifts at the Boys & Girls Club in Sequim.
Working parents
Many working parents tell Rosales that they can’t afford to feed their families well on $8 an hour – but that visiting the food bank in the morning is impossible with their work schedules.
Rosales and Fatherson broached the idea of expanding the pantry’s hours to the board some time ago. On Thursday night, the 10 directors present voted unanimously for the Monday-evening addition.
Afterward, Rosales called himself “ecstatic.”
“Our goal is to make sure nobody goes hungry,” he said. “I just want to do more.”
Both Fatherson and Rosales have responded to emergency phone calls from people needing food when the pantry was closed.
Just last week, Fatherson and her husband, Bill, a longtime volunteer at the food bank, brought some basics to a needy family who had just moved here and had next to nothing in the refrigerator.
“We work every day, Bill and I do,” she added.
Fatherson, 77, and her 82-year-old husband make the rounds among Sequim supermarkets, picking up fresh foods and hauling them back to the pantry.
For the first 17 of her 27 years working at the Sequim Food Bank, Fatherson drove her own truck – and put 400,000 miles on its engine before the bank acquired a Ford of its own.
But that vehicle too grew frail and inadequate, and in 2006 Rosales campaigned for private donations that enabled the bank to buy a GMC box truck.
Donations
Howie Ruddell of Ruddell Auto Mall sold the 14-footer, a slightly used 2005 model, at cost; among the contributors toward the purchase price were the Dungeness Country Store, which had put out a donation basket and collected about $335.
Now Rosales is looking forward to next month and anticipating an evening crowd similar in size to those that appear at the pantry on Monday and Friday mornings.
He added that people in need can also phone him — any time, any day — at 360-461-6038, and he’ll see that meals are delivered.
With his young daughters Elizabeth and Ashley in tow, he’d brought dinner to three families by 2 p.m. on Christmas Day last year.
“Hunger doesn’t take a holiday,” Rosales said, adding that he’d like to find a way to open the food bank on, or right after, the Mondays and Fridays that fall on holidays such as Memorial Day.
“The community has been really good to the food bank,” he said. “I want to make sure we’re really good to the community.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
