FORT DAVIS — Volunteers are moving quickly, unpacking palettes of fresh produce, loading vegetables into coolers, opening boxes of dried goods and stocking shelves while a warehouse garage door remains wide open, ready to welcome incoming delivery trucks.
It’s one of the Jeff Davis County Food Pantry’s busiest days of the week. It’s chaotic, yet organized; the shuffling of people and supplies is like a game of Tetris. “We try to put everything on wheels,” said Executive Director Vickie Gibson.
Gibson, armed with a clipboard, supervises deliveries that morning from the West Texas Food Bank and assists volunteers when they have questions, though they mostly work independently. The distribution center bears the name of the organization’s founders, John and Brenda Bell, who started the Jeff Davis County Food Pantry 25 years ago.
The nonprofit currently serves 530 individuals representing 235 households, nearly a third of the county. Over half, 57%, of their clients are either under age 18 or over 60. Because Fort Davis schools were built without cafeterias and do not offer free and reduced lunch programs like most public schools, the food pantry also runs school lunch and snack programs, adding to the complexity and cost of its operations.
The food pantry provides one lunch and one snack to 118 school-aged children 365 days a year, and supplies free snacks at schools and the county library. “There’s a lot of food insecurity in Jeff Davis County,” Gibson said. “Among children, it is particularly high. Those are the people we’re trying to help.”
The food pantry is hosting an open house — to raise awareness of its mission, show off new building additions and celebrate its 25th anniversary — this Saturday, April 20, from 4 to 6 p.m. at 609 Compromise Street in Fort Davis. The event also acts as a fundraiser, as the food pantry is experiencing a $50,000 budget deficit this year. Gibson said rather than cut programs, the food pantry board opted to find the necessary funds.
In addition to helping feed local kids, the food pantry also runs a senior box program — a curated selection of pantry staples distributed to 50 seniors once a month. It allows its clients more options for receiving food than local grocery stores. Clients can customize their orders online ahead of time, pick up via drive-through, “shop the shelves” in person at the distribution center and receive at-home deliveries.
The food pantry also provides free pet food, one of its most popular items among clients. “Sometimes that’s their lifeline, they’re lonely and isolated and the pets are really important to them,” Gibson said.
The Jeff Davis County Food Pantry is primarily funded by the FMH and Yarborough Foundations in Midland as well as individual donors. It receives some federal help in the form of food deliveries from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Of its $284,000 annual budget, $44,500 goes towards purchasing fresh produce, which is distributed to clients twice a month. Gibson said the Jeff Davis County Food Pantry is one of only a handful of food pantries across the state to purchase fresh produce for their clients, deemed a priority due to poor health outcomes in the county.
“Because we buy healthy food and fresh produce, we do spend more than most food pantries do,” Gibson said. “But I have never been of the opinion that people should be grateful for whatever they get if they’re living in poverty, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have the most healthy ingredients and food.”
Gibson runs a lean operation. The pantry employs three part-time employees, relying heavily on the labor of 15 regular volunteers. “We could not do it without our volunteers,” Gibson said.
Its annual trash bill is under $200 — volunteers recycle boxes and bags whenever possible, and take trash to the dump when needed, avoiding the cost of a dumpster.
The pantry partners with Mobile Communidad, another local nonprofit, which delivers food to the school district, county library and clients, some of whom are homebound, in Valentine and the Davis Mountains Resort.
Stephen Chavez, who acts as the transportation manager for Mobile Communidad, said one of the most meaningful parts of his job is delivering food to the schools and library, knowing children in need are being provided for. “I was a deprived kid, my mom being a single mother working,” Chavez said. “To me, this is personal.”
“It’s very refreshing to see that we can do something for the community,” he added. “There’s not enough of this going around these days, and I wish it wasn’t that way.”
Regular food pantry volunteer Diana Wilkinson shares Chavez’s personal connection to the organization’s mission. She was first introduced to the food pantry as a client when she moved to Fort Davis in 2020 “on a wing and a prayer.” “They fixed me up with all kinds of stuff, I went home crying,” Wilkinson said. “I was so ecstatically happy.”
Wilkinson then started volunteering at the food pantry, where she found support and community. She said spending time at the distribution center with food pantry board members, other volunteers and clients has given her a “sense of feeling needed and wanted.”
“This is my exercise. This is a way for me to actually express myself to other people,” Wilkinson said. “I am so psyched to help people like I’ve been helped.”
Gibson, too, finds satisfaction in her job at the food pantry, which she said makes a real difference in the community, particularly for area youth. “Kids can’t learn if they’re hungry,” she said.
She is hopeful the push for more donations will help the food pantry cover its current $50,000 budget deficit. “If we need more, we get more. It’s not like a pie and we only have so much pie,” Gibson said. “We just bake a bigger pie or make more pies.”
For more information or to donate, visit foodpantry-jdc.org/