The Nantucket Land Bank, Nourish Nantucket and Nantucket Food Pantry have created a tag team they believe could one day put food insecurity down for the count.
The trio of island organizations in late October partnered on the purchase of a Boynton Lane property intended to serve as a shared hub for food security agencies, provide a permanent home for the food pantry and include a processing facility to turn venison into meals for local families.
It’s a collaboration that many, including Nourish Nantucket advisory board chair Bruce Percelay have touted as the “ultimate win-win.”
“It was one of those very unusual circumstances where every group came together with a common purpose and found a solution that is the ultimate win-win, and we’re thrilled,” Percelay told Nantucket Today in October.
“Our goal is not to simply address the hunger issue, or manage the hunger issue. Our ultimate goal is to fix the hunger issue,” he said. “We can’t make guarantees, but we think it’s attainable, and we think the acquisition of this building gets us much closer to that objective.”
Nourish Nantucket acts as the umbrella organization for 12 different food-security agencies on-island, including the Nantucket Food Pantry, and coordinates fundraising and outreach on behalf of all of its partners.
Donations, including a $1 million gift received by the organization in September from a donor who asked to remain anonymous, are disseminated to each agency based on need.
Nourish has also been at the forefront of finding a permanent home for the Nantucket Food Pantry. its efforts go back about two years but ramped up over the last six months after it was revealed that the pantry’s lease of its current Washington Street location in the downtown Nantucket Regional Transit Authority bus terminal was to expire this winter, and an earlier backup plan to build a warehouse fell through.
The pantry began a frantic search for a new location, and at one point, manager Ruth Pitts said leaders even considered using shipping containers on an empty lot as a temporary solution because prospects were so grim.
