When the St. Columbanus Parish opened its food pantry in 2004, it served about 50 households each week. Now part of St. Moses the Black Parish, the food pantry regularly serves more than 700 households each week, distributing more than 2 million pounds of food and clothes each year.

To address increasing food insecurity in the Chatham, Greater Grand Crossing, Park Manor and Woodlawn neighborhoods, the pantry, located at 331 E. 71st St., raised $350,000 to renovated and expand into the parish’s Imani Center in the former St. Dorothy School, 7740 S. Eberhart St.

The move will quadruple the pantry’s space, said Father Matt O’Donnell, pastor of St. Moses the Black.

The space will be renovate by taking down walls, widening doors, installing a walk-in refrigerator and building a ramp to make the building more accessible for guests and trucks delivering food and other items

Guests will see an immediate change when they arrive and enter into a waiting and reception area in the former gym.

“All of our guests will be able to wait indoors instead of outside during inclement weather,” O’Donnell said. “I think it will help just the overall experience of the people that we serve who are coming to our food pantry.”

The new space will also have dedicated rooms for clothing and furniture, along with five rooms for the food pantry. The top floor of the school will also eventually be renovated to serve community needs.

“The plan is to make the whole building into a community hub,” O’Donnell explained. 

Judy Daugherty, pantry director, is ready to move into the new space and spread out.

“We won’t have these long lines,” Daughtery said. “And we won’t have the people outside in the freezing cold, and the rain and the extreme heat. It’s hard knowing that they’re out there.”

Robert Maggitt, a parishioner at St. Moses the Black, has been volunteering at the pantry for seven years. He is happy to see the pantry expand, especially because St. Dorothy was his parish before it merged into St. Columbanus.

“By expanding, we’ll probably get more people and be able to serve more and do a little bit better with the clothing and the shoes,” Maggitt said. “During winter it was horrible. They came in in slippers. We had to hustle, but we went out and we bought shoes and we bought boots and we provided them.”

As with other food pantries in the city, St. Moses the Black’s pantry saw an increase in need when migrant families and individuals began arriving, O’Donnell said, especially those who were staying at a camp outside a nearby Chicago police station.

“I think that was how people came to first know about us, then after that, as they got settled or even moved outside the neighborhood, they keep coming back here,” he said. “More recently, we’ve seen a kind of uptick since the beginning of 2025, just as grocery prices have gone up. So people who haven’t used a food pantry or haven’t needed to in a long time, they’ve been coming back, because it helps just to get through the month and fill the gaps.”

Longtime clients like Jerome Braswell also continue to visit the pantry.

“I get to meet my old friends and take the blessings that they give me,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for years … this is family. This is the right way to go. To me this is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

At the same time, the pantry’s needs will continue to grow, especially with cuts in some government assistance programs, O’Donnell said, Most notably, the diaper program that will end this summer. Pantry staff and volunteers are looking for new sources for diapers.

“The biggest thing that people can do right now outside of donating to a food pantry is advocating for support of the federal programs that make sure that those who are hungry get fed,” he said, adding that cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds programs for food insecurity, will have an impact locally. “I think people need to be aware that what happens at the federal level directly impacts food pantries like ours.”