Clark County Adventist raises funds for bigger building

“This is one of the needier neighborhoods in the city,” said Eleanor Hetke.

Bus stops on either side of Fourth Plain Boulevard are convenient as many clients already take the bus.

Adventist Community Services has been looking for a space for years — longer than Hetke’s been director — but it all came down to price and location. To keep serving the same people, they wanted to stay in the same area.

Rent keeps going up where they’re currently located, and the price to buy the entire building was too high. The nonprofit noticed in the fall that the Red Cross building was for sale and negotiated a deal.

Through donations, Adventist Community Services purchased the building for $560,000, said Dave R. Cannard, who is the nonprofit’s treasurer. The sale closed last week.

Adventist Community Services is sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist Community Church of Vancouver, which is part of the Oregon Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

The nonprofit is trying to raise about $400,000 to cover the costs of remodeling the rundown building.

Cannard said the plans include knocking down walls to make some areas bigger and adding about 600 square feet to the building, bringing the total square footage to about 5,600.

Hetke would like to see the future food pantry organized in such a way that volunteers could stock one side of the shelves while people are shopping on the other side. The renovations should take a few months, so the new building won’t be ready until late fall or early winter.

At its St. Johns location, Adventist Community Services has dealt with people dumping stuff at the back of the building: TVs, furniture, mattresses, garbage and bags of clothing that get torn open before volunteers arrive on Mondays. It hopes that the new location will mitigate that problem.

Being located on busy Fourth Plain Boulevard, the new building won’t be as isolated as the current one. And, there will be a fence and security cameras to discourage people from dumping or visiting the facility when it’s not open.

‘They all get a hug’

Adventist Community Services gives away an estimated 25 tons of food and 2,000 to 3,000 clothing items every month. The nonprofit serves anyone who lives in Clark County, typically about 1,000 people per month. Somewhere between 75 and 80 homeless people come in weekly.

“They all get a hug from me,” said volunteer Bert Day. She’s known as “Mom” to many of the people who come in and has a box of toys for homeless children.

Adventist Community Services is one of the top five distributors of food from the Clark County Food Bank. This year, it’s getting 327,470 pounds of food — about five percent of all the food from the Clark County Food Bank.

The nonprofit will give out nearly 10,000 food boxes. That’s despite the pantry only being open 5 1/2 hours a day twice weekly while the other top distributors operate five days a week.

Adventist Community Services also partners with the Oregon Food Bank, Northwest Harvest and buys some of its own food.

The food boxes are assembled a little differently. They use a system that assigns a certain number of points depending on the size of the household. Then, those points translate to foods on the shelves. People can fill up their carts until they’ve run out of points. The system reduces waste by allowing people to choose only food they want, Hetke said.

Maybe somebody eats chicken but not beef. Or, someone who’s gluten intolerant can select rice instead of pasta as their carbohydrate.

The system will stay the same at its new facility, it’ll just run smoother with more space, Hetke said.