An original rendering of the West Valley Food Pantry building, to open March 29.
The West Valley Food Pantry, located at Prince of Peace Episcopal Church in Woodland Hills, is opening a new facility on the property to expand food distribution operations. With the new West Valley Food Pantry Community Center, the pantry also will host on-site social services providers, said Debbie Decker, executive director.
The grand opening will be March 29, 11 a.m., at the West Valley Food Pantry, 5700 Rudnick Ave, Woodland Hills, CA 91367.
The food pantry works to end hunger in the San Fernando Valley by providing food and other essentials to those in need. The drive-through food pantry runs five days a week, distributing around 15,000 pounds of food from grocery partners per week, according to the pantry website. The pantry also has programs delivering food to seniors, serving about 600 per month. The pantry distributes hygiene items, school supplies, and other essentials in addition to food, as well as hosting vaccination clinics.
The pantry is a ministry of Prince of Peace, and for 40 years has been sharing the church’s space, including the use of the church kitchen and church offices for food storage. The new development, still on the Prince of Peace campus but specifically for the West Valley Food Pantry, includes a large parking lot for the drive-through food distribution, a walk-in fridge and freezer, palate shelving, a walk-in food distribution room, two community center rooms, one of which will eventually be turned into a kitchen, and offices. Once the kitchen has been created, the pantry plans to host cooking classes featuring chefs from local restaurants. The distribution room has been named Margaret’s Room, in honor of Margaret Shively, founder of the pantry.
The grand opening celebration will include government officials instrumental in the funding of the project, and Bishop John Harvey Taylor of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, who has long supported the project and was present at the 2023 groundbreaking.
In 1975, the West Valley Food Pantry began as a small food closet operated by the Prince of Peace Episcopal Church. Shively, then Prince of Peace administrator, along with the Rev. Canon Rand Reasoner, rector, and parishioners, worked together to maintain the food closet and provided food for three to five families a week over the course of several years, according to the West Valley Food Pantry website. In 1985, 10 other churches and synagogues in the area joined the effort, and the coalition became the West Valley Food Pantry. The pantry has continued to grow into and offer their services to more and more families.
It was during COVID, Decker said, that the pantry experienced its biggest growth. She said amid rising demand during COVID, the pantry went from serving its then-record 3,000 people in December of 2019, to serving 14,000 in April 2020. The pantry never shut down during the pandemic, and they continued to grow, garnering increasing attention from politicians and receiving greater food and financial donations, including from the Smart & Final Foundation, and eventually, the State of California.
At the time, Decker said, pantry staff thought that “at the end of the pandemic, we’d go back to being a little pantry. Well, we never went back.” Now, Decker said, they are one of the largest pantries in the county.
In 2021, the pantry received a total of $3.5 million state grant to build a new facility. It later received an additional $1.5 million from the state and raised an additional $2 million through fundraising and other grants, Decker said.
Recently, Decker said, the pantry has been serving a lot of wildfire victims, especially those who lost employment at homes, restaurants, or stores, in the areas affected by the wildfires. She said that those who lost homes have largely found other accommodations by now, but there is still a lot of need among those whose livelihoods were in the wildfire areas.
Decker said that while food distribution would remain the primary focus of the pantry, the expansion will allow them to better provide additional services to their clients.
“Food is just a window into people’s problems,” Decker said. “Once people come and they trust you, and they find out that you’re kind and you’re loving and you’re non-judgmental, then people start opening up to you, and we have learned about the other problems that are going on in a family.”
Previously, the pantry provided referrals to other agencies, but now, with a drop-in community center and community room in the new building, the pantry will be able to host social services organizations on-site, so that clients can get help with various issues while picking up food.
Decker said that in addition to the services, it’s important to offer people simply a welcoming place to be – a place to charge their phones and have cup of coffee if they’re unhoused, somewhere without judgment and without fear.
“Everybody goes through a crisis, nobody’s immune,” Decker said. “You can’t go through life without having something happen, whether it’s a death in the family or a major illness or COVID or loss of employment or a house burning down. We all, every single person in the world, deal with some major crisis. And if you have some loving, kind person who’s not just willing to listen, but give you a hand up, it makes all the difference. And that’s what we do.”