Food Ministries

Anyone who comes is served, without exception

Meals Served

Some of the most important things this church has ever done were never planned.

Before the pandemic, Community Cupboard was a modest monthly food pantry serving around 100 people. Then COVID hit, jobs disappeared, and people started knocking on the door. A small core of volunteers made a simple decision: as long as there was something on the shelves, they would give it out. They committed to showing up every day for anyone who came.

And then something unexpected happened. Food started pouring in. A woman pulled up out front and unloaded a trunk full of fresh vegetables. A local agency with government funding needed a place to distribute restaurant-prepared meals, and the church said yes. Volunteers from the YMCA came to help pack and hand out food. Week after week, the shelves stayed full.

When the outside funding ran out at the end of 2020, the need hadn’t gone anywhere. So the church kept cooking. What started as a response to a crisis had become something much larger, and there was no going back.

“There’s no way we could have planned this,” Rev. Denise Lay reflects. “It was all just God-guided, and things kept happening.”

Today Community Cupboard serves close to 35,000 meals a year and shows no signs of slowing down.

Who We Serve

When you come on a meal or pantry day, you see a true cross section of the community. Older adults on fixed incomes stretched thin by rent and medication. Families that are working but still coming up short, especially since SNAP reductions took effect. Multigenerational households, grandparents and aunts and uncles and two families under one roof, all trying to feed each other. Neighbors experiencing homelessness. Anyone who comes is served, without exception. That anti-discrimination commitment has been in place since the beginning and is not something we take lightly.

Programs

Prepared Meals

Every Monday and Friday from 4:00 to 5:00 PM, we distribute hot, prepared meals to anyone in the community who needs one. We typically give out more than 400 meals each session, more than 800 per week. Last year we served close to 35,000 meals total. This year we are ahead of that pace.

Drive-Through Food Pantry

Every Tuesday from 2:00 to 4:00 PM, we run a drive-through pantry where households receive a substantial supply of food to take home. A typical distribution includes a bag of non-perishable items along with bread, produce, and always a source of protein. Families often leave with as much as 50 pounds of food. Each week we serve between 250 and 280 households, representing roughly 900 individuals.

Community Cupboard is a USDA partner and receives food through Feeding Tampa Bay, part of the Feeding America network.

Volunteer

We are a church of about 100 members running a program that depends on roughly 75 volunteers each week. The vast majority of those volunteers come from the broader community, not from our congregation. We could not do any of this without them.

If you are interested in volunteering, we would love to hear from you:

Donate

Community Cupboard is an expensive program to run, and word of mouth is how we keep it going. If you would like to support the work financially, donations can be made through our giving page by selecting Community Cupboard from the dropdown.