Food Pantry's 'Three-Week' Move To Storage Unit Now Expected To Last A Year

WAUKESHA — Friends With Food Pantry has spent eleven days operating out of a 1,200-square-foot converted storage unit on Washington Street, a space volunteers now call the Mobile Pantry Era Headquarters, after a section of roof at its longtime North Street building gave way during a September rainstorm and left the ceiling tiles sitting directly in the canned vegetable aisle.

Executive Director Maria Gutierrez said the move to 340 Washington Street was supposed to last three weeks while contractors patched the roof at 442 North Street. That estimate has since been revised.

"Contractors cited supply-chain delays on structural materials, so we're looking at closer to a year"

— Maria Gutierrez, executive director

Gutierrez said the delay centers on a specific type of laminated beam the building's original 1974 roof requires, which the supplier has back-ordered twice. A whiteboard near the unit's folding card table now tracks the number of days since the collapse; as of Monday it read 24, a figure volunteers update each morning with a dry-erase marker that is, per a handwritten note taped beside it, 'not for client use.'

Four Pallets, One Hallway

The Washington Street unit, formerly leased to a kitchen-cabinet wholesaler, holds four pallets of nonperishables, a single chest freezer, and a folding table that doubles as the intake desk. Volunteer coordinator Pam Rusch said the layout requires a one-way foot traffic pattern she designed using blue painter's tape, modeled, she said without apparent irony, on the one-way streets downtown.

"You come in by the garage door, you go out by the side door. If you turn around in the middle you're basically doing a U-turn on St. Paul Avenue and someone's going to walk into you holding a case of Cheerios"

— Pam Rusch, volunteer coordinator

Rusch said the unit's one working outlet powers the chest freezer, a space heater, and a string of shop lights in rotation, meaning the freezer gets unplugged for roughly twenty minutes each Wednesday so volunteers can run a hot water kettle for the coffee station. She called this 'the trade-off we don't advertise.'

Hours Hold At Two Days A Week

The pantry is currently open Wednesdays and Saturdays, down from its previous five-day schedule at the North Street location, which served roughly 410 households a month before the collapse. Gutierrez said Wednesday distribution now runs in 20-minute shifts to keep the unit's single aisle from backing up into the parking lot.

Client Darnell Oduya, 44, said he's adjusted his schedule around the new hours but misses the old building's second freezer, which held the pantry's modest frozen meat supply. 'Now it's one freezer, two days a week, and you better not need ground beef on a Thursday,' Oduya said.

Roof Repair Timeline Slips Again

Gutierrez said the pantry's board approved a $340,000 repair contract in late September, but the laminated beams aren't expected to arrive at the North Street site until at least February, pushing reconstruction into spring and reopening toward next fall at the earliest. In the meantime, the board voted to extend the Washington Street lease on a month-to-month basis, which Gutierrez said costs the pantry $1,100 a month it hadn't budgeted for.

A hand-lettered sign near the unit's garage door now reads 'Mobile Pantry Era Headquarters, Est. 2026,' which board member Lon Trachte said he put up as a joke the week of the move and which nobody has taken down since. 'At this point it feels less like a joke and more like the actual name of the building,' Trachte said.

Gutierrez said the pantry is accepting volunteer shifts and canned-good donations at the Washington Street location during open hours, and asked that anyone dropping off large items call ahead, since the unit's garage door only opens about four feet before catching on a bent track the pantry has not yet had the budget to fix.