Sunshine Division, a Portland food relief organization, has opened a new food pantry that takes the form of a free grocery store. People in need can sign up for a time slot to come to the market and choose the groceries that best fit their household’s needs.
It’s a model that Sunshine Division says was most requested by the people they serve. Kyle Camberg, Executive Director of Sunshine Division, joins us to explain why.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez, in today for Dave Miller and I am so glad to be here with y’all on your radio today. We’re starting today’s show off with some good news for food access. The Portland-based food relief organization Sunshine Division has recently opened a new food pantry in the style of a market and shifted another existing food pantry to that model too. With an appointment, visitors can browse and pick up what they need, just like a grocery store, except everything is free. Kyle Camberg is the executive director of Sunshine Division, and he’s with us now to talk about why they’ve chosen this approach to fighting food insecurity. Kyle, thank you for being here. Welcome to the show.
Kyle Camberg: Thanks for having me.
Chávez: So before we look forward, I want to look back for just a second. Sunshine Division has been around in some form for over a century. I read that its first members were nicknamed George Baker’s Sunshine Boys. He was the Portland mayor at the time. Can you tell us a bit more about Sunshine Division’s origin story, which I found really fascinating.
Camberg: Yeah, I love it, as a lifelong Oregonian. Rewind back to the 1920s, you had the mayor – good job on your trivia there – George Baker, and the police bureau, and they took food out to people on Christmas Eve in Goose Hollow, not far from where we are right now, probably about a mile from here. And like a lot of traditions, after you do it a few times, it becomes expected. And so in 1923, the local media, the local radio – ironic, here we are -- dubbed these people the Sunshine Boys, which then became informally the Sunshine Division of the Portland Police Bureau.
And then in the 1960s, it was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) charity, and now we fast forward another 60-ish years later, and we’re a small local nonprofit here with a civilian staff, about 4,000 volunteers, and we still uniquely partner with the city and Portland police in a way in that Sunshine Division food boxes are still in Portland police precincts 103 years later. And folks from the bureau and the city still come out and volunteer at the holidays. So this year was the 103rd year in a row that we delivered about 3,000 meals right around the Christmas holiday. We also do it Thanksgiving and some other times, but it’s a tradition that’s stuck around 10 decades.
Chávez: Wow, 103 years. That’s major. So let’s time travel back to now. As you prepare to open a new headquarters in Northwest Portland and also remodel, update your location in Southeast Portland, you surveyed your clients about what type of food aid they wanted. And as I understand it, they overwhelmingly agreed on this idea of a free food market model. What did you hear from people about that?
Camberg: Well, it was nearly unanimous. We did a survey of thousands of people and across the board it was, what types of food do you need? What’s the best way to serve you? And really a question came down, what is the best way to help? We’re a nonprofit organization. We’re here to address immediate food insecurity, people who are in crisis for a variety of reasons. And what we heard was, it’s great that you have these holiday programs. It’s great that you have this home delivery, but the home delivery is not customized. But if we come to you, it’d be amazing if we could shop. And we said, gosh, we’ve been working on this new building project for, it’s about a 4-year project. We had to find the building, we had to remodel the building.
And so the entire time, how we were going to best serve the families and individuals we work with was kept in mind, And again, the feedback was overwhelming. If we can shop like you would at your local grocery store, that would be the best way. And so that’s really what we wanna do is be efficient, be smart, and help people in the right way.
And so we launched last week, we opened the new building, and people came and they scheduled appointments just like you would at a doctor’s office or perhaps at a barbershop or a hair salon. And people come down. It’s quick, it’s efficient, they get to pick out what’s best for their family, cause as I always say, I have a teenager, what his dietary needs are or what mine are might be different than yours. What your cultural needs are might obviously be different than mine. Perhaps religious differences, people that are on low sodium diets, there’s so many different variables. And so to give people choice, it’s almost obvious, that’s better than not having choice, so we’re excited about it.
Chávez: Why do you feel that people having the ability to have an experience that feels like being at the grocery store, where they, like you say, choose the food they want and leave what they don’t want, which is just as important. Why do you find that so important for people?
Camberg: Well, I’ve done this for 15 years, so I’ve dedicated a pretty significant chunk of my adult life to this, and the bottom line is, I feel like we have a responsibility to not just help people, but help them in the best way possible. And sometimes that’s the frustrating part, because there are resource limitations and food doesn’t just fall from the sky from us. It’s hard work to get the food, box the food, distribute the food. There’s all these logistic things. But if we’re gonna have people in our building you want it to be the most positive possible experience, you want it to be a dignified approach.
You also don’t wanna be wasteful. The food that’s donated to us is a finite resource, about 80% of it is donated by local organizations, grocers, food brokers, farms. But we also have to spend a significant amount of the money that we raise to go out and augment that, things like eggs and dairy can’t be put into a food donation barrel because they’re perishable, and so we wanna be a good steward of those funds as well. So we want to help people the best way possible, but also be efficient and not be wasteful, because the better we are at doing that, the more people we can help.
Chávez: Are there any requirements for people to be able to use Sunshine Division’s free food markets? Is it just available to people in need? What are the parameters, if any, there?
Camberg: Well, they’re very broad, so if you go to our website, you can see that. But when someone schedules an appointment and if it’s their first time... In fact, I was just leaving the building today, someone that came in and I said, is this your first time? The answer was yes. We’re gonna have them fill out a very brief, short demographic survey, and we’re gonna ask you, do any of these apply to you? Are you on Social Security income? Are you a senior citizen? Do you have minor children in your house? Are you a veteran? Are you a widowed veteran? Are you on Oregon Health Plan?
And there’s about five or six other things as well. Are you a student? A lot of kids that are, I say kids, young adults that are in college are experiencing food insecurity at record time. So it’s a very broad, vast – are you on unemployment? I could go on and on and on. And so we wanna know sort of the why, so that we’re, again, serving the clients and the families to the best of our ability. The number one and number two, and it’s not even close, is families with children and senior citizens that are on a fixed income.
And you know, I’m sure you’ve done the story: Medicare, Medicaid cuts, SNAP cuts, cost of gas, cost of groceries. Inflation that is exceeding people’s living wages. And so we’re seeing a lot of working families that have children, and we’re seeing a lot of senior citizens who their fixed income is simply making them have impossible choices at the end of the month and they’re turning to places like Sunshine Division. This isn’t a Portland or an Oregon unique issue. This is a national crisis that’s going on. People who once had these incomes and fixed incomes with seniors and families that are working simply aren’t able to keep up with the inflationary trends around all of those things that we all need in our life: food, shelter, healthcare. It’s not, like I said, it’s not unique to us here in Multnomah County. This is everywhere.
Chávez: So you ask people whether they are recipients of unemployment or Medicare or Medicaid, but they’re not required to be, is that right, to access the services?
Camberg: Yeah, I always like to say we’re not in the business of saying no or turning away. We’re here to help people. If you’ve shown up at the Sunshine Division, we’re going to assume in good faith that you need help. I get asked sometimes questions well, how do you know about fraud? And the amount of time you would spend worrying about that, you’d be wasting money to try to figure this out. I’ve seen the stories, you see the families, you see the individuals that come in. People are struggling. It’s really difficult in America for people right now, just to own a home in the Portland metro area if you don’t have an income of over about $110,000 you really can’t afford the median home. So that of course means more and more people are renting, and we’ve all seen the cost of rent around here.
So it’s just a lot of people are in crisis. We’re here to respond, we’re here to help, we’re here to be that immediate need when something strikes. And that crisis could be something as simple as needing a crown at the dentist, or your engine blew up on your car. Or for instance, right now, it’s summer and hundreds of thousands of children in the Portland metro area normally are accessing meals at their local schools, but school’s out and so where do those families turn? You have extra costs for daycare in the summer, you have a lack of access to food at schools because they’re closed in the summer. Where do those families turn?
They turn to places like Sunshine Division, and again, that’s not just here in Portland, that’s across the state, that’s across the country. There’s always a spike in need around the summertime, there’s always a spike in need around the holidays, and then when you put together that with what we’re seeing with the cost of gas and other inflationary trends right now, it’s really tough for families. And so we wanna be in the business of saying yes and helping people and not making this a difficult or undignified way of getting help. We want to make it simple and we want to be responsive.
Chávez: So tell me about what the response has been like so far since you opened this new market style pantry and shifted your other location to this model as well.
Camberg: Well, it’s been very positive. To rewind what the listeners wouldn’t know is previously, we’d been in an old machine shop in inner Northeast Portland, not far from the Moda Center, that is now almost a hundred year old building for the past 50 years. And we got every ounce of life out of that building, but it was not a warm or welcoming…This was a building that was built in the 1930s to manufacture something and it was not a great home for a food bank, and it wasn’t super welcoming. So to go from that to now have a building that we were very intentional about with the families and the clients in mind, there’s a Trimet stop literally 10 feet from our parking lot. There’s actual parking. It’s not a fistfight out on the street to try to wedge into a spot that doesn’t exist. It’s close to downtown. That’s another thing we’ve seen, we’re about a mile north of the heart of downtown.
And so there’s so many people saying, “Oh gosh, there’s something on our side of the river now.” And so that’s been great as well, but really the fact that it’s welcoming. Again, the fact that we make it easy. We have a lobby that is temperature controlled, there’s a novel concept, having proper AC when it’s hot out. And going in a space that again, that’s designed. So everything we did in the building was intentional, and I think it really shows with, like I was saying, how people are happy when they show up. People showing up at the food bank already have a lot of stressors in their life. We want to make this a positive experience and make it efficient and quick and I think we’ve done that successfully.
Chávez: I know that not all food relief options use this choice model, there are food pantries where folks just get a box of food that’s chosen for them. What would you say to other food relief organizations who might be considering adopting a free food market model like yours, because I’m seeing these pop up and I think it’s, for all the reasons you said, it really gets to what people have told you they want and need, right?
Camberg: Yeah, and there’s food pantries and food relief organizations and a whole myriad of types. There’s everything from schools and churches and Meals on Wheels, that focuses on seniors more, but if they can, I would recommend they do it. It’s different, logistically it’s a little more complicated. When we were in the midst of the pandemic, we went to food boxes and we literally opened up a chute out of a warehouse with roller doors and people would show up and we would push a box down these rollers so that we didn’t have to get too close to anyone, and you had to do it that way. It was not the best way of helping people, but it was the best in the midst of the pandemic.
We’ve also done the model a couple of different ways where people place orders, but what you see is when you get to go into an actual space and see what’s available and make choices, it’s just a better way of serving people. So if folks have the way to do that and if they’re in the food relief industry, if you wanna call it that, if you’re in the business of helping people, choice is always gonna be better.
Chávez: Well, Kyle Camberg, thank you so, so much for joining us today, and we’re so glad to have you in the studio talking about your new market.
Camberg: Thank you so much for having me.
Chávez: Kyle Camberg is the executive director of Sunshine Division. Find out more about their new free food markets at sunshinedivision.org.
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