Keystone Community Services provides food shelf support for over 26,000 people every year in the Saint Paul and Roseville area. We learned in February that our sub-lease for our Roseville food shelf site, located at 2833 North Hamline Avenue, will be terminated as of August 31, 2019. This was unexpected news.
Since February, we have met with faith community leaders, contracted with a commercial real estate broker and worked with City of Roseville economic development staff to locate a new site for our food shelf which provides food and crisis supports for nearly 2,500 people every month. As of today, we have not been successful in locating a site in Roseville or the surrounding communities that is affordable or meets our space requirements. We will continue to work with our partners to secure a suitable location.
Unfortunately, the loss of our Roseville site comes at a challenging time for our community and Keystone. In the past three months, participation at all of our food shelf sites including our mobile distribution sites has increased by 10-24% every month. These increases in participation are directly connected to rising housing costs and a tight rental market. Most of our participants are employed yet over 55% of their annual income goes towards housing costs.
Keystone is also having to stretch our resources to meet the ongoing and increased need in our community. We are challenged to find a new location that meets our budget constraints. Consolidating our food shelf operations means that for the first time in our history, we will be limited in our ability to serve everyone who needs food support after August 23rd.
While we continue to work towards finding a suitable location and longer-term plan, here is our food shelf service plan which takes effect on September 1
- Roseville area residents who need food shelf services will be able to participate at our two Saint Paul locations or at a mobile food shelf distribution.
- We are expanding service hours at our Midway and Rice Street food shelf locations and will be adding an evening distribution at each site once per week. Complete service hours and locations can be found on our website here.
- We are adding more mobile food distributions in the Roseville area and all Foodmobile public distribution information is available on our website here. We are still working on confirming some new Roseville distribution locations and those will continue to be added to the website as they are confirmed.
- Ramsey County residents who do not live in our food shelf service area will be given information about their neighborhood food shelf and provided one food shelf service to support them until they can access their local food shelf
We know this is transition will have an impact on our community and we will continue to be as responsive as possible to needs in our community. Keystone is committed to continuing our 35+ year tradition of supporting neighbors in need in Roseville and the surrounding neighborhoods.
We will continue to work with our partners to locate a food shelf site to support residents of Roseville and the surrounding communities who need food supports. We are grateful for the steadfast support of our funders, civic groups, faith communities, volunteers and partners who make all of our food shelf services possible. Please contact us with any questions or ideas for our future.