Nonprofit Woodland Action seeks volunteers to help food bank, more

WOODLAND — While Woodland Action is primarily known as a food bank, the nonprofit’s executive director sees the center differently.

Leslie Mohlman envisions Woodland Action as a one-stop shop for people in need. To get to that point, she has some needs herself — and the main one is people. Mohlman wants Woodland Action to have a resource room with computers for clients to use while waiting for the food bank or for help with resumes and job searching.

The center already offers workshops on nutrition, job support and parenting, and she’d like to do more of those, as well as bring in other agencies her clients work with. The Washington State Department of Social and Health Services and health care clinics have made recent visits, and Mohlman said she’s looking to partner with any agency interested in coming to Woodland Action, 736 Davidson Ave., Woodland.

“(The clients) are already here, so why not connect them to the resources they need?” she said. “I’m not going out to reinvent the wheel or create a new program. I’m looking to bring in existing, successful programs.”

But to turn Woodland Action into a one-stop resource center, Mohlman needs more people, mainly volunteers who can free up time for others to work on setting up these relationships.

The Woodland food bank, which serves an average of 1,100 individuals from 400 households a month, is struggling for volunteers, and recently stopped offering Saturday distribution services after expanding to two days a week about a year ago. The food bank now distributes food from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays only.

“We’re at about halfway where we’d like to be,” Mohlman said. “We’re in urgent mode all the time because we don’t have enough people.”

Much to do

On a recent Tuesday, Mohlman checked people into the food bank and bagged potatoes in addition to her executive director duties. For Tuesdays, she said she’d like to have around 25 volunteers. Woodland Action also has volunteers other days of the week, working in the warehouse, picking up food donations, sorting food and doing administrative tasks. The center has a thrift store upstairs, which funds about half of the nonprofit’s operations. The store is run by volunteers.

“There’s a misunderstanding of hunger in America and hunger in our area,” he said. “A lot of our clients do have jobs, but don’t make enough to put food on the table.”

Mohlman said the center caters to both “situational poverty and generational poverty,” by helping those who are in a rough spot while between jobs or when an emergency expense pops up, as well as those who are in need of continued help over a longer period of time.

Gast said the center has started keeping metrics on who uses its services, and throughout the last two years, he’s seen a 50 percent graduation rate, meaning half of the customers who used the food bank at any point in one year didn’t return the following year.

“People have a life circumstance that dictates they need our service, and we’re there for them,” he said.

Fulfilling needs

Dhana Gunter uses Woodland Action to fill out her grocery shopping when she can’t do so on her own. The Woodland resident first started going to the center about a year ago; she started volunteering seven months ago. She’s now the food bank’s floor manager and volunteers there three days a week, where she’s appreciative, both as a client and volunteer, of the center’s array of options.

“People have a lot of different needs,” she said. “With a lot of food banks I’ve been to, they don’t always have a lot of variety. We do.”

Gunter said the center has food for people with dietary restrictions who can’t eat gluten, sugar or dairy. Mohlman said the center tries to focus on healthy eating, and recently started getting fresh produce from Safeway.

One problem the center has run into is that with the closing of Saturday distribution, some donations don’t make it to Tuesday because they go bad before the next open distribution day rolls around.

Another issue facing Woodland Action is garbage dumping. The center’s thrift store is open Tuesday through Saturday and only takes donations on days the store is open. But on most Tuesdays, volunteers return to find furniture, garage sale leftovers and bags filled with dirty clothes and other items left outside.

“People will literally put stuff into a large garbage sack and leave it,” Gast said. “Our volunteers wear gloves when they dig through them. Some of the stuff they pull out is pretty gross. If you wouldn’t personally give it to a friend or family member, why would a nonprofit want it?”

That leads to a problem of getting rid of the items. Mohlman said the center pays on average $1,000 a month to haul away garbage, and last month it was around $1,300. The center has increased its social media presence to try and bring in more volunteers, as well as educate the public. After last month’s price tag for hauling garbage, the center posted a graphic on Twitter that said $1,300 could provide 6,500 meals.

“We’re trying to educate people, but it’s a consistent issue,” Gast said. “It’s costing us a lot of money to haul people’s stuff away, and we can’t afford that.”