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Community Action Center receives grant to expand food storage
By Chloe Kucera, Faribault Daily News
Apr 22, 2025
The Community Action Center food shelf is receiving a boost in its fight against hunger thanks to a grant to expand food rescue capacity at the Faribault and Northfield locations. This will allow it to store more fresh and frozen food for families in need.
This grant from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) totals $105,000. with these funds, the Faribault food shelf will purchase and install a new cooler or freezer. The funds will also be used to install pallet-sized doors on the coolers and freezers, allowing staff and volunteers to stock goods more efficiently at the Faribault and Northfield food shelves.
The Faribault CAC will double its storage and food rescue capacity through these improvements. The CAC expects to increase food rescue intake by around 30% between both locations.
Food Access Program Director Michael Pursell said this will allow the CAC to take in more food, which will be saved from waste, whether near its expiration date or unwanted.
According to a study by the MPCA, “of all the food Minnesotans throw out, over 95% could be diverted from the landfill, and about 46% could have been eaten or donated.”
Since opening the food shelf in Faribault, the CAC has seen the tremendous need for its resources in the community.
“We were invited to open a food shelf in Faribault amid the pandemic in response to community need, and so what we’re seeing is that in Faribault, we’re not even close to saturating the markets,” Pursell said. “We’re already serving more than a third of the population through our food shelf now, and the increase shows no sign of slowing down yet.”
The CAC tries to make the food shelf as accessible as possible for those in need.
“They don’t need to provide any documentation,” Pursell said. “We don’t even ask for an address, so the barrier to entry is very low. If someone comes to us and self-declares their eligibility for the program, we take their word for it, and they can get food.”
The amount of people the Faribault CAC food shelf serves has grown significantly.
“We definitely underestimated the demand in Faribault. We hadn’t been open for very long when it became clear that we would need more space, more refrigeration,” Pursell said. “It was a brand new location, but we outgrew it very quickly. We served a ton of people in that first year of operation, and it’s grown by between 40% and 50% every year. So it’s been a very steep climb.”
Pursell said Faribault has responded well to the CAC serving the city.
“The community has responded positively to our presence there. And not just the fact that we offer food as a resource, but the way that we offer services,” he said. “it’s important we do everything we can to provide a safe and judgment-free space.”
Pursell said that since the COVID-19 Pandemic and due to the current state of the economy, food insecurity has risen to unprecedented levels. Rising food prices have impacted the CAC.
“Unfortunately, the cost of food for organizations like ours and regional food banks is rising along with the cost of food at your local grocery store, so that just means the whole system is strained,” Pursell said.
The CAC has also seen some impacts of federal cuts by the Trump Administration.
“Just a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the TEFAP program — which is overall federal hunger relief and does a lot to supply regional food banks across the country, including ours — Had about $500 million cut from their budget a couple of weeks ago, and we saw an immediate dip in the reduced cost food that was available to us through the food banks,” Pursell said. “We’re largely a community-funded organization, so there aren’t going to be a lot of direct impacts for us from the federal level, but we are starting to see some of the indirect fallout from those cuts.”
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