WHITEHALL — After years of operating in the limited space available at the Lebanon Lutheran Church's main building, the White Lake Food Pantry and local Scout Troop 1048 are on their way to having their own building after a ceremonial groundbreaking took place Sunday afternoon next door to the church.
The building is projected for completion early next spring; Lebanon Lutheran pastor Doug Ogden said there is a "very tentative date" of April 25 set for an open house.
The White Lake area's Scout Troop 1048 has been operating out of the church for several years now, since the Scouts were informed that the rental house they had been using was uninsurable, according to former longtime Scout leader Brian Holmblade, who wrote down thoughts that Ogden shared at the ceremony. The White Lake Food Pantry has been operating out of the church even longer and now serves over 100 households per week.
The pantry, Ogden said, began very humbly, when the late Irene Swenson, who was tutoring kids through the Blue Lake Cooperative Tutoring Program, observed that kids learned better when they had sufficient food. She and some volunteers worked together to provide food to some of her students - a few families per week. From there, the pantry has grown by leaps and bounds. Partnerships with Love In the Name of Christ (Love INC) and other organizations grew the pantry from a handful of families per week to dozens. Ever since COVID-19 lockdowns and the several years of economic uncertainty that have followed, patronage of the pantry has increased even more.
Things run well out of the church, but there are drawbacks. Space limits, to some extent, how much can be stored, and more importantly, the pantry's storage is in the church basement. Items have to be brought up to ground level for distribution; Ogden joked that the elevator that is sometimes utilized for this purpose is marked "not for freight," and so much for that.
That will be remedied in the new building, which will be a one-level structure with no stairs needed. There will also be an overhang to protect volunteers and food pantry items from the elements on distribution day.
The pantry will take up about one-third of the building, which will measure 48 feet by 90 feet. Another third will be garage space for storage, with Scouting activities taking up the final third.
Like the pantry, Scout activities have run alright out of the church building, but the increased space will be a boon. Scout master Matt Cope, who's been working with the Scouts for 12 years, said projects sometimes have to be disrupted or delayed because of other activities going on at the church. The garage storage space will give the Scouts the opportunity to store equipment, such as canoes, that occasionally are unavailable to the Scouts because of other events, as well as display awards and honors that, at present, there's not really room to show off.
Cope said he's also hopeful the enhanced space for Scouts will result in more kids being interested in joining. He noted that while he grew up on a farm in a two-parent household and learned at a young age skills such as cooking or how to start a fire outside if needed, that's not the world every child lives in. Bringing kids into the Scouts provides the opportunity to learn many of those life skills as well as serve the community.
The building has been financed over several years thanks to the generosity of several groups. The White Lake Area Women provided an annual donation to the Scouts starting in 2021 in the amount of $10,000, which was then doubled thanks to help from Rob Markiewicz, a friend of Ogden's who put that money through a nonprofit donation matching program at his then-employer, Battelle Memorial Institute. In 2024, the WLAW added support for the pantry to its portfolio, and Battelle doubled its maximum match at the same time, enabling even more money to be raised. Markiewicz no longer works at Battelle, eliminating that annual donation match, which is part of the reason the decision was made to move forward with the building now.
Ogden added that funds raised through Wesco's Round Up program, which offers shoppers the option of rounding up their in-store fuel purchases to the next dollar, have also been a big help to the building, contributing about $25,000 annually.
Visscher Construction, which is working with the church on the building, has assured Ogden that potential cost overruns and the current tariffs in place should not be a factor in the timeline of the building's opening. The pragmatic Ogden is still steeled for the possibility that that won't be the case, but so far, things are on schedule for the building to open next spring.
"We're celebrating today because we have many talented and committed people," Ogden said in brief remarks prior to the groundbreaking. "We don't know what the future holds, but we have many volunteers on the church side, the pantry side, and the Scouting side."
