The line at the Hendricks County Convention Center Expo Hall is long. People in it carry empty boxes and reusable grocery bags. Some have carts. When they get to the sign-up table, Bill Matlock or Teresa Muncie asks for the number of people in their household and their ages. Then, Muncie gives them a clothespin with a number on it. They move past her to lines of boxes and cans of food stacked on a row of tables. Each has a sticky note with a number written on it to tell people how much they can have.
Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana’s Mobile Food Pantry visits the convention center once a month and typically serves between 90 and 125 families in two hours. Volunteers from the Hendricks County Coalition of Food Banks run the event.
Matlock and Muncie each operate a food pantry in the county. Matlock’s is at Stilesville Christian Church. Muncie and her husband, Gary Montgomery, run theirs at Graceway Fellowship in Plainfield. Their pantries, along with several others in the county, are Gleaners partners.
A Gleaners partnership used to mean that pantries could pick up donations from retailers at a food storage warehouse in Indianapolis. Now, Hendricks County pantries can bypass the warehouse and go directly to the retailer. Muncie, who is partially blind in both eyes after having a stroke in 2000, arranges pickup days for Graceway, Stilesville Christian, St. Mark’s, St. Stephen’s, and Faith Lutheran.
“It’s my way of being able to help people,” she says. “If I could help people financially, I would, but I can’t do that. This is just my way of helping.”
The work keeps her and her husband busy about 48 hours a week. The pantry is open for regular hours twice a month, but they also serve folks as the need arises. Besides his work with the Graceway pantry, Montgomery works nights as a security guard.
“We did not expect it to blow up and expand like it has, but by the grace of God, it has and by the grace of God, it keeps going,” Montgomery says.
The Graceway pantry serves an estimated 80 to 105 families per month. Muncie says the work is a continuation of a lifelong desire.
“Helping people has basically been my passion all along,” she says.
Coalition board member Brandon Morphew is the administrator of the food pantry at Abundant Life Compassion Ministries in Danville. He says the coalition has served 158,000 meals this year so far and all 21 member pantries have served more people than they did last year.
“You have to look beyond the people that may abuse it, because if you can reach the ones that do need it, that’s what’s important,” Matlock says. “I think it’s just the right thing to do – help each other.”
Originally published in Hendricks County ICON, 2016. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.