Food bank seeks larger facility

Wasilla Senior Center's storerooms packed

with provisions

By DANIEL SPOTH-Frontiersman reporter

WASILLA -- In a community containing many needy residents, a food bank that finds itself growing too quickly is hardly bad news.

The food bank operating out of the Wasilla Senior Campus' Floyd Smith Senior Center is bursting at the seams, with storerooms stacked full of supplies and rooms choked with parcels and volunteers.

According to Betty Mercer, the food bank's only paid employee, the organization distributes more than 20,000 pounds of food per month, and served more than 450 individual families last month. Each family may comprise as few as one or as many as 16 to 18 people who, thus necessitating a large stock of food. The food is donated by the United States Department of Agriculture and administered through the Anchorage branch of the Food Bank of Alaska.

The bank, which relies primarily on residents of the Senior Campus to collect and distribute its supplies, has been growing steadily over the past few years, and is now seeking to expand with a new building. To this end, Mercer decided to spearhead the creation of a nonprofit organization called Sunrise Services, devoted primarily to the acquisition of a larger work area.

"The senior center has been wonderful in helping us, but we've exceeded their capacity," said Bonnie Lee, vice president of Sunrise's board of directors. Lee said the main impetus of the organization is to obtain a newer, larger facility for the operation of the food bank, but once this is secured, its attention could turn to other programs for instruction, aid and shelter.

However, in doing this, Sunrise doesn't want to step on the toes of any of the Valley's existing charitable agencies.

"We don't need redundancy," Lee said. "There are lots of other organizations in the area that perform some of these functions very well."

Eventual goals of Sunrise include culinary arts, retail sales and employment skills for low-income families, as well as other life skills training. Lee and Mercer envision putting needy residents to work in a soup kitchen, a used clothing store, a restaurant, or a woodworking shop.

"We want to be able to teach [people] something that they can go into the community and use," Mercer said.

These plans are all considerably further down the road, however. The most pressing need is for a larger facility, a fact that is constantly reinforced by the sight of the Senior Campus's packed storerooms and lines of applicants stretching down halls and out doors. Sunrise hopes to receive land or structure donations from the community to achieve this end, and is also seeking additional members for its board of directors -- especially professionals trained in fundraising, grant writing and accounting. A vehicle donation would also be very helpful; the center currently encounters difficulties transporting the large volume of food that needs to be distributed. According to Mercer, people come from as far away as Talkeetna to receive food at the Wasilla bank, and the strain of dealing with these far-flung communities inspires fond wishes of easier transportation.

Among the special programs that the center handles are the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program and Commodity Supplement Food Program, which provide special foodstuffs for seniors, low-income families and pregnant women.

Despite the fact that Sunrise has a long way to go, the organization has accomplished a lot in the short time it's been in existence, and is in much better shape now than during the time of its inception.

"When we finally finished with our incorporation, we didn't even have enough money to buy champagne to celebrate," Mercer said.

If the plans currently being tossed around at the Wasilla Senior Center ever come to fruition, however, the group will have plenty to be happy about.

Contact Daniel Spoth at daniel.spoth@frontiersman.com.