For 56 Years, This Berkeley Food Pantry Built a Community. Now It’s Shutting Down

For the last three years, Robin Franklin has been a fixture of the Berkeley Food Pantry’s thrice-weekly distributions.

Without fail, she can be found on the bottom floor of the Berkeley Friends Quaker Church on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, running the operation’s cold bag assembly like a well-oiled machine, loading paper sacks onto a queue of rolling carts to be wheeled out to the church parking lot.

“They didn’t used to do it like this. They didn’t use the carts,” Franklin said Wednesday as she packed macaroni salad — a premium “extra” — into bags filled with eggs and chicken.

“The bags get done by a morning group. They get them all set up on the table. I load the carts, and then when we start getting down, if we still have a lot of people coming in, I start making more bags,” Franklin said as a line formed around the block. “If there’s any that aren’t given away, then I have to break them down, put stuff back in the refrigerators, in the freezer, so it doesn’t spoil.”

That’s about to change, though, after the pantry shut its doors for good on Friday.

For 56 years, it operated out of the Berkeley Friends Church in North Berkeley, providing fresh produce and groceries to more than 4,000 Berkeley and Albany residents a month. But since July, Franklin and the pantry’s community of more than 100 volunteers — along with its shoppers and three part-time employees — have known changes, at the least, were on the horizon.

As the operation expands beyond the church’s capacity, and its congregation ages, Berkeley Friends Church announced over the summer that the pantry would merge with the larger Berkeley Food Network, which serves about 6,500 residents a week in West Berkeley.

The pantry said at the time that beginning this year, it would be managed and overseen by the Berkeley Food Network, but its food distribution program would continue to operate at the church site.

Then, in December, the groups jointly announced that negotiations had fallen through, and the Berkeley Food Pantry would shutter at the end of January. A group of regular volunteers is still trying to figure out a way to keep the pantry open elsewhere, but it’s unclear whether that will be possible.

“It’s incredibly sad,” said Marice Ash, who has volunteered every Wednesday for three and a half years. “It just feels like a very mutual, self-help community coming together. I’m going to miss it … and people need this. That’s hard, too, knowing that we’re closing when there’s so much need.”

Ash said that other food banks nearby will likely absorb the organization’s stock and customers, but the pantry has always felt different.

“We’re a little anarchic,” she said, laughing. “It’s a creative place, and we’re not stuck in narrow jobs. If you see a job that needs to get done, you can jump in and do it. And the clients are jumping in all the time, too.

“There’s a lot of people who’ve been here for years and years — in fact, some people … are still working here every day,” she continued.

Ash remembers when Franklin first volunteered: For years, she rummaged through the church’s garbage bins for cracked eggs and spoiled produce to feed her chickens. One day, she came by during a distribution and noticed that the crew was short-staffed, so she locked up her bike and offered to help.

“I’ve never missed a day since,” Franklin said.

Becky Cooper mans the “milk area,” directing clients to the right food bags from behind a small plastic table on Wednesdays. She said she started volunteering about nine months ago, when she came to pick up groceries for a neighbor on a day that they didn’t have a lot of help.

“I said, ‘[Do] you want me to put my groceries in the car and then I’ll come help?’ That’s how that happened,” she told KQED.

“It’s a nice interaction with the people, and it makes me smile,” she said. “If you can smile on Wednesday, you can make it to Friday.”

The pantry was founded by a Berkeley Friends Church member in 1969, and it still operates under the church’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

But last month, as the church and the Berkeley Food Network tried to negotiate the future of the pantry, it became clear that neither organization had the capacity to transition and keep the pantry running, “particularly in light of the impacts of the government shutdown and surging needs for food assistance,” they said in a joint statement. “This mutual conclusion reflects a commitment to responsible stewardship of community resources.”

Franklin said that when the partnership with Berkeley Food Network fell through, a group of volunteers had hoped to find another nonprofit that might take in their operation. They identified two in the fall; one didn’t have a physical space large enough, but the other, First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, already runs a bi-weekly pantry on Saturdays, she told KQED.

She said the Berkeley Friends Church didn’t seem open to those options.

Steve Sims, the presiding clerk for Berkeley Friends Church, said that the church is aware that some volunteers are trying to relocate the operation elsewhere and plans to meet with them in February to share their knowledge and give input. He said the pantry has volunteer and donor lists it could share.

“We’re going to kind of take a fallow period to catch our breath, and then we’re going to do some discernment about what should be done with residual resources,” he said. The new operation wouldn’t operate under the same name, he said, but “if the new pantry is something that looks like it’s a viable operation and would be a responsible use of that money that still remains, we could contribute to them.”

But running the pantry out of the church is no longer an option, after it grew rapidly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic while the congregation dwindled in size.

“We just didn’t have the capacity to run that big of an organization,” he said.

Along with the community they built over several years, volunteers said the pantry’s closure also means losing longstanding relationships that people who’ve worked at the pantry for more than a decade have formed with local grocery stores and nonprofits. Most of that food will be redirected to other organizations, like Berkeley Food Network, but Franklin said some of these deals were unique, like one that a volunteer had struck up with the local Trader Joe’s for their damaged egg cartons.

She takes out the cracked ones and repackages the good eggs into new dozens — setting aside the broken ones for Franklin’s chickens.

Target delivers diapers and toiletries, and Tim Tang, who travels more than two miles by bike and bus to reach the pantry from South Berkeley, said he can sometimes get a rare assortment of specialty foods.

“I can pick up stuff that they usually don’t give out at food banks, like fermented foods … kimchi or some kombucha, or a bread that’s not made from wheat,” he said.

Customers can get four bags once a month — two of produce, along with one of grains and another with meat and eggs — and can come back a second time for two more, Cooper said. But Tang shows up on almost every distribution day because of another unconventional fixture of the pantry’s operation: the sharing table.

In the back corner of the church parking lot, people gather around two plastic folding tables, discarding and grabbing items they don’t want to schlep home or likely won’t eat.

“The general idea is that if you don’t want it, you put it on the table, and then there’s always other people like us vultures kind of circling around,” he said, eyeing a can of corn that’d just been put up for grabs. “It’s just kind of, so they don’t have to haul it home and throw it out.”

He said when the pantry closes, he’ll probably go to the Berkeley Food Network’s 9th Street warehouse, where they distribute food on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“It’s going to be kind of a pain,” he said, adding that getting to the other spot means a bus transfer and likely longer lines.

Most of the volunteers said they would also look elsewhere to continue their work, though many aren’t sure where yet.

“Next Monday, when I’m not going to be here, am I going to be happy? I’ll figure out a routine for myself; it’ll just be different. I’ll be losing contact with a lot of the people around here,” Franklin said.

As Wednesday’s distribution was wrapping up around 4 p.m., many of the regulars were headed to Ash’s house to commemorate the final day.

“We’ve vowed to try to stay in contact. But you know people have busy lives,” Franklin said.