A $1 million infusion of federal funding is giving a much-needed boost to build out a South Portland food security hub that provides thousands of meals to people across the region.

Preble Street’s Food Security Hub, a first-of-its-kind resource in Maine that opened last year, received word last week that it is getting additional funding through the federal appropriations bill approved last week.

The money means Preble Street is about halfway toward its goal of raising to $12 million to renovate the facility on Darling Avenue – work it hopes to start this year.

“Sadly, food insecurity isn’t going to go away anytime soon,” said Mark Swann, executive director of Preble Street, a nonprofit social services provider that addresses homelessness, hunger, and poverty. “This facility will have such flexibility with space and capacity that when the population shifts or emergencies happen or agencies close … this place will be here and be able to pivot and grow.”

‘A 20-YEAR VISION’

The Food Security Hub came out of the COVID-19 pandemic and Preble Street’s need to find a safer, non-congregate way to provide meals from its soup kitchen at its resource center in downtown Portland. Staff moved to a delivery model, working with the city of Portland and others agencies to get food out.

The pandemic also highlighted the need for more housing, particularly in city shelters. So Preble Street began thinking about whether its resource center was being used the best way it could be.

Staff drafted plans to convert the building into the new Elena’s Way shelter, and started looking for new kitchen space. They found a 30,000-square-foot space in South Portland, which allowed the agency to rethink its approach.

“We thought maybe this is something where we can really have a 20-year vision and work with other partners, plan for the unexpected, and have more emergency preparedness,” Swann said.

Since moving in last year, staff and volunteers have operated out of a temporary kitchen, but it hasn’t slowed production. When they left the former soup kitchen downtown, Preble Street was serving 900 meals per day. Now it’s up to 1,900.

Part of that stems from increased need, and part is due to new partnerships and collaborations, such as with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Maine.

“The Boys & Girls Club is a great organization, but food preparation isn’t their core competency, and it is what we do,” Swann said. “So we had conversations and we are now doing meals for them. I think that’s something that’s going to happen a lot here.”

Swann estimates Preble Street eventually could serve up to 10,000 meals per day as the hub grows. Most of the money for meals comes from private funding and donations, but Preble Street is also considering adding more paid partnerships, such as the one with the Boys & Girls Clubs.

‘AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PROCESS’

On a recent morning, the temporary kitchen was abuzz with staff and volunteers to prepare the day’s meals: red flannel hash for breakfast, turkey and kidney bean chili for lunch, and chicken curry with rice for dinner.

A chart on the wall listed their various destinations: Preble Street’s Florence House and Elena’s Way shelters, Milestone Recovery, the city of Portland’s Oxford Street Shelter, two hotels housing the homeless and asylum seekers, and the Boys & Girls Club of Southern Maine.

Chef Emily Yates, who oversees daily meal preparation, said Preble Street can work with what they have now, but the new space will greatly expand capacity and allow them to process produce more quickly.

“It will be an entirely different process,” Yates said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

The space, once all renovations are complete, will include a warehouse-sized cooler and freezer that will allow them to store 50,000 meals, helping the agency become more efficient and better prepared to address emergency situations, like a power outage at Franklin Towers last fall that affected over 200 low-income and elderly residents, or pandemic staffing shortages that left local nursing homes short on meals.

Preble Street has run into situations where they’ve had to turn away donations of fresh food because it couldn’t be immediately used.

“People offer me truckloads of winter squash and I have to say, ‘I can’t. It’s going to sit here and rot,’ because we can’t process it,” said Joe Conroy, Preble Street’s director for food programs and services. “Now we’ll be able to make use of all that stuff.”

The food hub is one of more than 200 Maine-related projects to secure funding in the appropriations bill passed by Congress last week. U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, who submitted the project as part of the government funding bill, said in a statement that rates of food insecurity are growing not only in Maine but around the country, due to the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis.

“Preble Street is a model for the rest of the country, demonstrating ways we can tackle both food insecurity and food waste by thinking outside of the box,” Pingree said.

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