Fran Doucette steps down in April after two decades of serving the community at Gorham Food Pantry.

GORHAM — After two decades at the Gorham Food Pantry, Fran Doucette is stepping down with plans to retire and relocate.

Doucette, director of Gorham Food Pantry, is retiring from the job April 27. She was one of the pantry’s founders in 1997 and became its third director in 1999.

She said Gorham Food Pantry treats everyone with dignity and respect.

“I hope that continues after I’m gone,” she said at the pantry last week.

The food pantry, sponsored by the Gorham Ecumenical Council, is located in the parking lot at St. Anne’s Catholic Church, 299 Main St. It serves 487 households in Gorham.

A search for Doucette’s successor is underway. ////Diane O’Neill, president of the board of directors,  Wednesday praised Doucette. “She’s done so much for the community,” O’Neill said. O’Neill is conducting interviews and those interested should apply quickly by contacting [email protected]. /////

The pantry serves Gorham residents of all faiths, including Catholics, Muslims, Russian Baptists and Hindus, and those who are not religious.

“We never turn anyone down,” Doucette said. “We call them clients.”

She never takes credit for the pantry’s success, either.

“This (pantry) was a God-given thing,” she said. “The Lord has led me all my life.”

She and her husband are members of Cressey Road United Methodist Church, one of several churches that sponsors the pantry.

Paul Doucette is a Gorham native and she grew up in Bethel, where she learned about “neighbor helping neighbor,” she said.

She graduated from the University of Southern Maine with a degree in education. She remembered when college girls in 1970 at the university were first allowed to wear slacks.

“I was a flower child of the 1970s,” she said, and recalled wearing maxi skirts and adorning her hair with daisies.

For 10 years, she taught special education and fought “tooth and nail” for her students. “I got burned out,” she said.

When the food pantry was just getting off the ground, some local churches already had their own programs to feed the needy. But Doucette and other founders discovered that some of those had food going bad while some others had bare shelves. “We decided to centralize,” she said.

The pantry began in a 79-square-foot closet at St. Anne’s. Several years ago, it  acquired a former town-owned portable building and received a grant to move and renovate it.

Volunteers from First Parish Congregational, South Gorham Baptist, and United Church of Christ at North Gorham – along with Cressey Road Methodist and St. Anne’s – staff the pantry.

Clients have included drug addicts, alcoholics, homeless veterans and senior citizens. If they need a shoulder to cry on, they’re given a shoulder, she said. Other clients have included diabetics and cancer patients.

Organic and gluten-free food also is available at the pantry. “We can help just about everybody,” she said.

Some clients when they are able, contribute goods or help out as volunteers.

Doucette recalled food drives for the pantry by churches, postal workers, school children, civic groups, businesses and one that gained widespread media coverage. Several years ago two people at First Parish stood on a steeple ledge high above School Street for 24 hours in bitter winter cold in a drive to replenish bare pantry shelves. “That was fantastic,” Doucette said, ” it got a ton of publicity.”

For children, the food pantry provides healthy snacks and kids’ books. Doucette organizes the holiday food baskets distributed by the churches.

“People in Gorham are very generous,” she said. “They have kept us well-provided for,” Doucette said.

Doucette and her husband, Paul Doucette, who retires next month from the Guiding Stars Department at Hannaford Corp., plan to move to New Hampshire to be near one of their two daughters and 9-month-old granddaughter.

“Family life is No. 1,” she said.