It took over a year, but the major remodel of the main floor of the office building is now complete.

“We are not handicap accessible,” Lord’s Cupboard Director Joni Ham-Olson told The Messenger in December 2019. “We have a lot of volunteers and clients who cannot come down the stairs. We want to remodel and make it handicap accessible.”

Since its founding in 1974, the Lord’s Cupboard has always been located in some sort of basement. It started in what was essentially a closet in the basement of the church. The food pantry moved to its most recent home in 1987.

Ham-Olson said that in recent years, it’s become more and more clear that the basement location was not ideal for the food pantry.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
The Lord's Cupboard food pantry recently moved into the newly-remodeled upstairs of its building.

“It’s been a topic of conversation for a number of years,” Ham-Olson said. “The stairs were the big hurdle — it was a hurdle for our clients and it was a hurdle for our volunteers.”

She said that the food pantry always tried to be accommodating to clients who couldn’t come down the stairs. A volunteer would bring their food up to them, but that wasn’t necessarily sustainable.

Ham-Olson said she explored putting in an elevator or a ramp system and even looked into moving to a whole new building altogether. Instead, the church decided to gift two-thirds of the main floor of the office building to the Lord’s Cupboard.

Once the leadership at First United approved a remodel plan for the main floor, Ham-Olson got started on fundraising for the project, which was expected to cost about $250,000.

An anonymous donor eventually reached out through First Presbyterian Church, offering to match $100,000 in donations to the project.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert Local Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts volunteered to help move food pantry inventory from the basement of the Lord's Cupboard to the newly-remodeled main floor on Friday.

Over the next three months, Kolacia Construction worked on the remodel. COVID-19 did cause some delays in the project, Ham-Olson said, but the remodel was finished earlier this month. Tuesday will be the first day the food pantry will be open in its new location.

The remodel included a new waiting area for clients, several storage closets, a large main pantry room and handicap-accessible bathrooms.

On Friday, volunteers from local Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops helped move hundreds of pounds of food donations from the basement of the building up to the main floor to the new food pantry.

The Lord’s Cupboard serves about 300 households each month, Ham-Olson said. Much of the food the pantry gives out comes from the Food Bank of Iowa. The pantry also relies on donations from local organizations, individuals and businesses. Target and Fareway typically donate food from their shelves each week, she said.

The Lord’s Cupboard also offers personal hygiene products and other household necessities, like soap, for its clients.

“We’re not a grocery store; we’re a rescue pantry,” Ham-Olson said. “We try and provide a lot of things and we’re a nonprofit, so everything that goes out of here was either donated or purchased with donated money.”

The Lord’s Cupboard will host a joint worship service on April 25 with several churches in Fort Dodge. The service will be outdoors near the food pantry site and there will be an open house of the new space after the service.