What started as a temporary way to help neighbors during the financial crisis and uncertainty of the 2020 COVID pandemic has become a permanent — and growing — fixture in Key West. The grassroots Little Free Pantry program, which started with some well-stocked shelves providing free nonperishable food items on Geraldine Street in Bahama Village, recently expanded and installed a second Little Free Pantry, this time in New Town.
On Dec. 18, Kevin Paul Taylor, a Key West mail carrier who established the first Little Free Pantry in Bahama Village in March 2020, joined City Commissioner Sam Kaufman, his wife Julia and son Michael, along with Leah Stockton and Dave Crooks from the Florida Keys Outreach Coalition and AH Monroe and volunteers Kathleen Goldstein and Mary Hanel McDowell to launch the brand new Poinciana Little Free Pantry.
The new teal cabinet was donated by Goldstein and her husband, Danny, and will be restocked daily with food and toiletries, thanks to the efforts of Michael Kaufman and McDowell.
“Back in 2020, we had thought the first Little Pantry on Geraldine Street would just be temporary,” Taylor told the Keys Weekly recently. “But food insecurity has just kept growing. We’ve always had people coming to Bahama Village from New Town to access the Little Free Pantry. But my efforts to install a Little Pantry in New Town were fruitless. I tried again during the SNAP crisis in November and Scott Pridgen, executive director at AH Monroe, didn’t hesitate to support the idea.”
The new pantry is right outside the FKOC offices on Truesdale Court in the Poinciana housing complex off Duck Avenue.
“We’re thrilled to have this second pantry set up,” Taylor said. “Many folks are embarrassed to go to a traditional food bank when they need a little help. That’s one of the benefits of the Little Free Pantry program — folks can access it discreetly 24/7, no questions asked.
“A few years ago an older lady who lived on Geraldine Street was thanking me for the food. Her car had broken down and all of her money for that month went to fix it. She relied on the pantry for food that month,” Taylor said. “I met one lady who wouldn’t go to the food bank because she knew one of the volunteers there and she didn’t want her to know she was struggling.”
Hunger and struggle are a global problem. Thankfully, so is the Little Free Pantry movement. It started in 2016, when Jessica McClard installed a small cabinet stocked with food in her neighborhood in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Today, there are more than 2,300 Little Free Pantries around the world. The little pantries are accessible to anyone 24 hours a day with no questions asked, and they’re restocked daily. Donations of food and personal items are crucial to the Key West pantries’ survival.
“The Little Pantry isn’t eligible for any of the $75,000 the city recently approved for food pantries,” Taylor said. “Because we’re not a nonprofit. The Little Free Pantry was and is a grassroots effort supported by neighbors helping neighbors, not government or corporations. So we keep moving forward knowing this community will always answer the call.”
More information is at littlefreepantry.org.
