SAGINAW, MI — A growing community appetite has two Saginaw food insecurity-fighting nonprofits setting the table for a big expansion.
Some of the ingredients already are in the mix for Hunger Solution Center, home of East Side Soup Kitchen and Hidden Harvest.
Officials representing both nonprofits said they have secured about $6.3 million of $8.8 million needed for an expansion that will double the organization’s shared East Genesee Avenue facility, where demand for help has nearly tripled in 20 years.
“The building’s great, we love it and it’s well-suited to the collaborative relationship that we have between the two organizations,” said Samantha McKenzie, president of Hidden Harvest, a food rescue agency. “But we’ve grown a lot, and our building needs to grow with us.”
It’s downright congested at times inside 940 E. Genesee.
Staff members and volunteers pack tightly into the kitchen, where the East Side Soup Kitchen cooks up food that serves up to 900 meals on some days in a dining space no larger than most elementary school cafeterias.
Storage units are stacked with boxes of food that — in some corners — nearly touch the ceiling. Freezers are stuffed with items that sometimes seem aligned like Tetris blocks, in configurations meant to fit as much storage as possible into tight repositories. The contents often are hand-hauled by volunteers with Hidden Harvest, a nonprofit that provides food for East Side Soup Kitchen as well as nearly 200 other food insecurity-fighting agencies in Saginaw, Bay and Midland counties.
And East Side Soup Kitchen regularly hosts a curbside pick-up operation that sometimes sends volunteer food distributors outdoors in extreme weather environments. On a morning this month when some schools canceled classes because of dangerously-cold temperatures, more than a dozen Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 1098 volunteers handed out boxes of food to hundreds of single-file vehicles that crept slowly along the streets surrounding the facility until they reached the front of the line.
The planned $8.8 million facilities expansion would alleviate some of those challenges, organizers said.
Plans include a new kitchen, new storage spaces and walk-in coolers, a supersized dining room, loading docks and distribution-friendly infrastructure that organizers said would make operations there more safe and efficient.
The update would involve eliminating a block-long stretch of the adjoining Thompson Street, which would become part of the property housing the expanded Hunger Solutions Center building.
“The need is great,” East Side Soup Kitchen Executive Director Diane Keenan said of the planned expansion. “We need more space.”
The demand for added space is evident in the math, expansion advocates said.
Keenan said the East Side Soup Kitchen served 50,000 lunches in 2004. By 2023, that figure grew to 172,373 lunches.
Hidden Harvest, meanwhile, distributed 820,000 pounds. of food in 2004 compared to 3.5 million pounds in 2023, officials said.
The nonprofits’ representatives so far have successfully lobbied for financial support for the expansion project from lawmakers, community foundations, companies and some high-profile donors.
Among the largest contributions to the cause so far: Michigan legislators provided a $1 million state grant for the expansion and Saginaw leaders allocated $1 million in federal stimulus funds for the project.
Jim Dwyer, chairman of the Hunger Solution Center’s fundraising campaign, said organizers now are finalizing plans to pitch a campaign drive seeking funds from the general public. Details about that wing of the campaign will be announced in the coming weeks, he said.
“When I tell people about (Hunger Solution Center) and what they are providing, and then I tell people what we need, people can’t believe it,” Dwyer said. “Food insecurity in our region is a real thing; this isn’t happening in some other city or a foreign country. This is happening here, and the goal for us is to eradicate it here.”
Organizers said they hope to break ground on the expansion project as early as this spring and complete the update sometime next year.
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