photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The parking lot of Just Food's building at 1000 E. 11th St. is pictured Friday, Aug 26, 2022. The food bank received American Rescue Plan Act funding that will help it to expand the lot and potentially double the number of parking spots.

The past couple of years have been quite busy for Just Food.

Perhaps the biggest milestone in that time has been the renovation of the food bank’s building at 1000 E. 11th St., which was completed about a year and a half ago. That project was a great success, Just Food’s interim executive director, Brett Salsbury, told the Journal-World last week. The building was fully renovated, complete with an expanded food pantry, a kitchen for the agency’s programming and office spaces.

But those renovations didn’t account for parking.

“Through the whole process, obviously that was a great success; it’s been incredibly helpful, and it’s totally been a game-changer for our operations,” Salsbury said. “But now we see a need. With how busy (we’ve been) not only just recently but in the past year or two, it became apparent to us that we had parking issues.”

The facility does have a fairly small parking lot relative to how many folks it serves; there are only about 20 spaces, and just two of them are handicap-accessible. On days like Aug. 16, when the food bank broke a record for patrons served in one day — 478 households — for the third time this year, Salsbury said the parking situation doesn’t cut it.

Patrons sometimes will have to park up in the grass next to the building above the curb, or they’ll often just find a spot on the street outside, Salsbury said. Sometimes they’ll park in the back, and on other occasions their only option is to temporarily park their cars out on 11th Street and wait for a spot to open up.

“It’s just increasingly becoming not sustainable, especially when you also consider the fact that we have a bunch of volunteers that come to our facility every day,” Salsbury said. “That number can range from 20 volunteers a day to 40 or 50 volunteers a day. And of course we have staff members; we’re a staff of 10, so they all need places to park, also.”

That’s why the agency decided to apply for some of Douglas County’s American Rescue Plan Act funding. When Douglas County leaders completed the process of allocating those aid dollars last month, they granted $325,000 to Just Food.

Salsbury said the majority of that amount, $250,000, will go toward expanding the parking lot. It’s not clear precisely how much the lot will be expanded yet, but he said it would likely double the number of parking spaces at 1000 E. 11th St. That renovation will also account for adding a circle drive that extends completely behind the building.

“That should also help with people dropping off food donations in the back, too, kind of streamlining that experience for them,” Salsbury said.

Expanding the parking lot generally will allow the agency to serve more folks and do so more efficiently, Salsbury said, but it’ll also help mitigate other challenges patrons might face, such as “time poverty.” He said not every patron could sacrifice time in their day to sit and wait until a parking spot opened; they have a limited amount of time to get the food they need and then make it to work or pick up a child from school on time.

For now, there’s no firm timeline for when that work might be complete or even when it’ll start since the agency is still in the early stages of seeking bids, Salsbury said.

As for the remaining $75,000, that’ll go toward improvements in Just Food’s warehouse. Though Salsbury said the agency was still in the assessment phase of how that chunk might be spent, it could potentially go toward projects like improving the warehouse’s insulation or raising the food bank’s capacity to store more food onsite.

Food storage capacity is especially relevant to Just Food given another, more recent milestone for the agency; earlier this month, it signed a deal for a new downtown Lawrence satellite location that will help it support a ready-to-eat meal distribution program that it started back in March.

The idea for that program perhaps even predates Salsbury’s time with the agency, which started in 2019. He said that back then the food bank would receive large donations of sliced bread or other perishable items recovered from area grocery stores, and leaders thought about what it would take to repurpose ingredients like that into meals like sandwiches.

Bringing on Chetan Michie, the owner of Latchkey Deli, as the agency’s first sourcing and production manager made a venture like that a reality.

“It goes without saying that we’re really excited about having this kitchen available,” Salsbury said. “…It’s really exciting this is all happening at the same time.”

Projects like this wouldn’t have been possible if not for ARPA funding, Salsbury said, unless it were through a capital campaign that funded the new parking lot over a longer period. But a parking lot doesn’t exactly generate the most excitement from a fundraising perspective, so he said the aid dollars would go an especially long way.

“We’re so grateful to have the opportunity to utilize these funds and not only improve Just Food but improve Just Food now and for years to come,” Salsbury said. “It’s only going to help Lawrence and Douglas County on the whole, as well.”