When Trish McGowan moved to Colorado a few months back with her boyfriend, they fell on hard times and it was difficult to know whether they would be able to eat a good meal on any particular day.
After approaching the to find a job, she found the and learned about the center’s self-select grocery, which allows people to choose the food they want.
On March 16, McGowan came back to the grocery for the second time and raved about the good food she was leaving with and the help she received.
“Itap very dignified so you don’t feel worse than you normally would,” said McGowan, who vows to volunteer at the Action Center once she is back on her feet financially. “I’ve never had to be in this position before, but I needed help and hopefully on the other side of this, I can help someone.”
The Jeffco Action Center opened its grocery two years ago in an effort to provide its participants with better access to healthy food and has seen it continue to feed families.
The grocery is filled with fruit, vegetables, meats, frozen goods, dairy products and prepared foods that are donated from grocers such as Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Sprouts. The grocery also has canned and dried foods for those who might be living on the street and don’t have access to a kitchen. Participants can use the grocery up to six times per year and leave with a five-day food supply for their families.
The grocery has been a significant upgrade over the Action Center’s previous food program, which gave participants a box of nonperishable food items and whatever produce it could get its hands on.
“We realized in our old system that we were putting things in people’s food orders that were exacerbating those issues,” Jeffco Action Center executive director Mag Strittmatter said.
The Action Center serves about 25,000 people per year with about 80 percent of them using the grocery. The program is based on the to build a healthy eating style.
Participants will go through the grocery with a volunteer over the course of about 25 minutes and select items off the shelves. The volunteer will have a sheet from the MyPlate program and make sure they meet all the criteria on the checklist. The volunteer will also have information on the participantap needs and family size so they leave with an appropriate amount to feed their families.
“What this does is it allows us, after we go through the whole shopping experience, to know that the participant is leaving with a well-balanced, five-day, nutritious food supply,” said Barbara Penning, director of volunteer programs and in-kind donations for the Jeffco Action Center.
Penning noted the food that participants leave with each day would have ended up in a dumpster a few years ago because a fruit item might be slightly bruised or another piece of food or a condiment is past its sell-by date. Penning said the food is still good, but in the past, the stores would throw those items away. Now these stores will donate items to places like the Action Center rather than toss them. The center brings in about 1.5 million pounds of fresh food each year.
There are about 80 volunteers who help out on various shifts at the grocery, including Jan Bakken, who started about a year ago after donating money for 17 years. Bakken enjoys helping the participants and said that most of them are grateful.
She even gets cravings at times for what the participants are leaving with and needs to go shopping afterward.
“This grocery is great. In fact, I get food envy after working here. I often have to get to Trader Joe’s and buy something,” Bakken said.
Strittmatter said the grocery has been a good draw to find more participants over the past two years as some will receive a recommendation to visit the center for the food but will end up with more services as well.
“People come in because they need food, but really there’s a reason, whether itap a car repair or they lost a job, we can get them upstairs and get to the deeper issue,” Strittmatter said.
As participants leave the grocery, they are given a bouquet of flowers, something that really stuck out to McGowan as she left the grocery last week.
“I don’t care, you may be hungry, you may be dirty, you may be tired, to have something like that is just a little thing to make you feel like a human being,” McGowan said. “We’re all human beings. To be in bad situation without hope is worse.”