Empty Bowls provides needed funds to Community Cupboard

The Community Cupboard in Leavenworth, which serves as a food bank and thrift store, serves between 600-700 people per month. There are 200-250 food boxes for families, including some 250-300 kids.
Cupboard Manager Bob Mark said it grew for awhile, but has gone done the past few years, which is a good sign. “People find they aren’t needing the food as much or finding other ways to get their needs met, so that’s good,” Mark said.
Mark said they have been pretty fortunate gathering food for the community.
“In this community, people are extremely supportive of the community cupboard, food donations and monetary donations to help us buy food, especially during the holidays,” Mark said.
Safeway had $10 bags over the holidays. Mark said Safeway sold 1,400 of those bags.
“That is a lot of food that is going to come by the case load to us. It’s already coming in. We’re going to have that food for a good stretch of the year. Things like that really help,” Mark said. “We do the grocery recovery at Safeway six days a week. That provides a lot of good, fresh food for people to have on a daily basis. There are a lot of ways we can access food around here. People are very supportive. We’re very fortunate.”
Empty Bowls was started 22 years ago locally by Nancy Peterson and Jeff Hilton as part of a nationwide program to alleviate hunger. The first soup supper was in Sheila Bergren’s garage and it expanded from there.
“It’s always been a fundraiser for the Community Cupboard food bank. For a number of years, they’ve also done art grants to support artists in the community. There’s been funds set aside to help that too,” Mark said.
The help from Empty Bowls has been huge, he said.
“Thinking about how lucky we are in this community, especially how much Empty Bowls supports us as much as they do is a big piece of that. If you talk to a lot of food banks around, there are a lot of folks who don’t have a budget for food,” Mark said. “They rely on what they get through donations and through various distributors like NW Harvest, which support food banks. Having a budget to purchase food we don’t get for free is a luxury that we have here. A lot of that is due to the Empty Bowls Festival. It raises 50 percent or more of our food budget.”
Empty Bowls usually raises $10,000 to $15,000 for the Cupboard, which is a luxury, Mark said. It’s been instrumental in helping keep the food shelves stocked with the things they don’t get for free, like protein items, cereal, juice.
There are certain things the Cupboard doesn’t get for free, so having a budget for it is very helpful, he said.
Things are changing at the Community Cupboard as a new space has been secured for the thrift store, just up the street. This will be a big change for the food bank too. It’s exciting, he said.
“The idea we are moving toward with our food bank is choice model, shopping experience where people can have much more choice with their food,” Mark said. “Based on family size, you will have a certain number of points. You can come and go as much as you want during the month. You have a certain number of points to use up. Hopefully, we can incentivize healthy eating and those sorts of things.”
Ultimately, it comes down to what people choose to eat and what they take from the food bank, he said.  
“We’re excited about moving in this direction, giving people as much choice as they can have. In the next few months, we’re hoping that can become a reality. Currently, we’re working on setting up the next thrift store space. When that happens, we’ll shift gears and get the new food bank space going,” Mark said.
Tickets are already sold out, as usual. The artist bowl auction, March 7-24 is now the only way people can still get tickets to soup supper. Mark said they get a lot of calls about that.
Even though they’ve moved to the Festhalle, they can still only serve a limited number.
“You are working with restaurants that provide a certain amount of soup and can feed a certain amount of people. They sell tickets based on that scenario on how many they can feed.,” Mark said. “The space is good, but they still have to work within the confines of the soup provided.”
A sidebar to this article features comments from some of the folks served by the Community Cupboard. Mark gathered comments over a month or so. He said people were pretty helpful and wanted to share their stories.
 “Most of them didn’t want to share their names, but wanted to share their stories. They were grateful for the opportunity to share what the food bank has meant to them,” he said. “It’s interesting. I don’t know if people really understand why people might come to a food bank. It’s a pretty humbling experience to walk up to the food counter and say I need some help. There’s a variety of reasons why that happens.”
For one reason or another, Mark said people have fallen upon hard times and have to make some tough choices between paying bills and putting food on the table. The Cupboard is way to help out.
“There’s a lot of seniors on fixed income. Any extra expense during the month can throw them off.
There are folks just coming to the Community Cupboard looking for work, and they need help with food. Just generally, the most common experience is people have just fallen on hard times. The food bank is place they can come and help fill the gaps a little to supplement their food needs in their household,” Mark said.
It is a monthly food box. It’s not a whole lot of food, he said, but hopefully it’s enough to supplement what they already have.
Ian Dunn can be reached at 548-5286 or editor@leavenworthecho.com.