Charlie Williams, manager of Food For All, moves boxes at the Walton Street location in Portland. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

On a hot and humid afternoon, people rooted through newly delivered boxes of pears, bananas, lettuce, cauliflower, potatoes and tomatoes in a cramped alcove in the back of Portland’s Food For All Services. Some who had come to see what had arrived in the food pantry chatted alongside the stainless-steel industrial fridges.

Charles Williams, the manager, swept the floor as he directed the lunch rush, advising people to take at most three onions and two peppers. As for other basic items, like bread, they were free to grab what they’d like.

Food for all Services is a nonprofit – a combination African market and food pantry, open seven days a week, that tries to help new immigrants feel at home by offering them food they know, that they are comfortable cooking with and addressing any food insecurity they may have without making them feel ashamed.

In 2019, Khadija Ahmed, the founder and board president, and Williams, her husband, started the African Mobile Market to deliver food to refugees and asylum seekers who were living in different spots around southern Maine. In 2022, the operation became a nonprofit, and they transformed what was previously their storage space into what is now their storefront.

To Ahmed, the grocery store was important. We wanted “to remove the stigma from accessing food that comes with poverty,” she said. All visitors, whether buying specialty goods or coming to the food pantry, enter through the same door.

In the middle of the bustling store, there is a rack of imported food for sale: cassava flour from Ghana, pounded yam from Nigeria, fumbwa leaves from the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African staples, like fufu. Many of the customers are refugees and asylum seekers from Congo, Angola, Somalia, Nigeria and Ghana, said Williams, and these food products offer them a “taste of home.” Sometimes, customers will request specific ingredients, and Williams will track them down.

The food pantry relies on donated foods that are “everything grocery stores could not sell” – though not necessarily ingredients that newcomers are used to cooking with. By combining the African market and the pantry, the couple’s aim is to encourage new Mainers to learn how to use the free American ingredients while offering them the African ingredients that keep them from “forgetting who they are or where they came from.”

The Immigrant Welcome Center directs new Mainers to Food For All Services. When she worked on the community integration team of the IWC, Belviga Mpolo sent new immigrants to Food For All Services. She said that a lot of African mothers came to her in search of fresh milk, vegetables and meat for their families. She heard from people who went to Food For All Services that it offered quality food that, because of the African market, was different from other food pantries.

“I sent people there because I know they’re very good,” Mpolo said.

Charlie Bart-Addison, a student from Ghana who attends Roux Institute, shops at the pantry in Food For All – nonprofit food pantry and African market all in one. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Nearly all their customers use either food stamps or city vouchers to purchase the African staples the store has for sale. They are staples the couple behind Food for All Services describe as culturally relevant to those who buy them.

Giovani Yamutvale stopped by the pantry in scrubs on her lunch break from Maine Medical Center where she is an EVS worker. Originally from Angola, she said that – with ingredients from the store – she can make dishes like stewed cassava leaves from her home country.

Charlie Bart-Addison, 40, who also came to the pantry, moved from Ghana last September to study project management at Northeastern’s Roux Institute. He started going to the pantry the month after he arrived and said it helps him to have consistent access to food.

To keep costs down at the nonprofit, Williams is the only paid employee. A lot of work is done by volunteers. The couple’s three college-age children often help out and bring their friends, and their 14-year-old volunteers “every now and then,” Williams said. He joked that their 6-year-old son goes “for the food.” Rayyaan Hakizimana, their eldest son, who is 6 feet, 7 inches tall, said he shows up every day and is considered “the muscle.” On delivery days, he unloads pallets of food from the truck.

To cover its operational costs, the organization relies on sales from its market and grants, but money is tight. One major expense is waste disposal – $25 per drop-off. About 75% of the food that comes in from grocery stores can’t be given out because it has already gone bad, Ahmed said, so they often have to drop off multiple loads a week. They’ve contemplated getting their own dumpster, which would cost about $400 a month – but they don’t have the money.

They make sure food doesn’t go to waste even if it’s gone bad, composting what they can. Ahmed’s mother will often stop by to pick up stale bread for the birds she feeds on Commercial Street.

Married couple Khadija Ahmed, left, president of Food For All, and Charlie Williams, manager. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Food For All Food Services also serves as the umbrella organization for the Halal School Meals Network, which helps get halal meals to Muslim children at schools in Portland, South Portland and Westbrook. Ahmed said she heard many complaints over the years from people who came to the pantry and market that their children couldn’t eat the lunches served at their schools because they didn’t follow Islamic dietary guidelines.

“It is an acknowledgement of the existence of these people here,” Ahmed said of the school meals effort. “There have been a lot of immigrants in Maine. Their culture is important and relevant.”

Ahmed, who was forced to flee her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo when she was in her 20s, said “food has always been a passion” for her.

“Food was a way for me to reconnect with my culture and make sure my children were not lost from what I know as being food of my people,” she said. “People without culture are a lost people.”

She has been working to reduce food insecurity since she first moved to Maine nine years ago. She began in 2016 by volunteering once or twice a week at the Preble Street Food Bank. She worked her way up. By 2021, she was the food programs supervisor leading the Culturally Appropriate Food Initiative at Preble Street. In this role, she primarily planned and prepared meals that new Mainers were comfortable and familiar with, but she also visited the immigrant families herself to check in to see if they had other needs that needed to be met.

Ahmed now works as a community impact manager at Good Shepherd Food Bank of Maine where she says she advocates to get more culturally relevant foods into pantries across the state to help the more diverse population that now calls Maine home.

“Yes, Maine is a very white state,” Ahmed said. “But we do exist. We are here.”