Keystone Community Services plans to open a new Community Food Site in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood in 2022. This new site will increase Keystone’s capacity to provide food to our neighbors. We invite you to review the information below about the new site.
Keystone purchased a 20,000 square foot building on University Avenue near Fairview Avenue. We are in the beginning stages of planning for this new community food site that will bring all of our basic needs programming into one location, including Foodmobile and crisis services.
Why a new facility?
This new site will provide us with the opportunity to significantly expand our food and crisis services for people living in our service area. This project is part of our 2020-2024 strategic plan and we have accelerated our timeline to complete this project due to the pandemic and increased need in the community.
The site will have many features that will help Keystone increase efficiency and serve more people, including:
- A much larger shopping area for participants to select foods that meet their household’s needs
- Increased capacity to receive and warehouse food
- Large volunteer spaces to tap the enthusiasm of corporate and community groups
- Spaces for Family Navigators to meet residents privately to discuss crisis assistance and make connections to other resources
Why is Keystone creating a new community food site?
Put simply, we need more space to provide more services to a larger number of people in need. The new 20,000-square-foot site will support an increasing number of people turning to us for food and crisis support.
We experienced a 93% increase in services in September 2020 compared to September 2019. We are anticipating the need will continue to increase in 2021, 2022 and 2023 as the economic impact of the pandemic has already disproportionately impacted low income people and it will take them longer to recover lost wages and overall household income.
By the end of 2022, we expect to be supporting over 50,000 people with food and crisis supports, nearly a 50% increase over 2019 service levels of 28,000 people.
