Emerald Food Pantry is one of 20 food pantries serving the people of Lane County under the auspices of Food for Lane County. The purpose of the partnership between Food for Lane County and the local pantries is to distribute emergency food boxes to low-income families and individuals in Eugene, where low income is defined as eighty-five percent of the median. Because almost all of our clients are already receiving some form of government subsidy, such as food stamps, the pantries are not designed or provisioned to be a primary source of food. Therefore, clients are limited to sixteen visits per fiscal year. Emerald Food Pantry service is reserved for clients residing in our service area, which is bounded by the Willamette River on the North, 7th Avenue on the South, Garfield Street on the West, and Coburg Road/Ferry Street Bridge on the East; however, we do provide one-time assistance, as well as pantry referral, for those who come to us unaware of our geographic restrictions. The rest of Eugene proper is served by Catholic Community Services, whose designated clientele includes the homeless, the Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul Food Box Program, Daily Bread, and the Buck Center.

In addition to setting our service limits, Food for Lane County, as our parent administrative organization, provides and delivers virtually all the food we receive for distribution at Emerald. Food for Lane County receives its products from various surplus and salvage sources including the United States Department of Agriculture, the Oregon Food Bank, participating local grocery stores and food producers, food drives, and individual donations. The physical plant which houses Emerald Food Pantry is owned and maintained by the Eugene Seventh-day Adventist Church. Miscellaneous expenses incurred in running this Pantry, such as delivery of food from Food for Lane County, utilities, food re-packaging materials and office supplies, are paid for from an endowment from the estate of Adeline Huffman, who died in 1998. It is also through the generosity of this endowment that we were recently able to computerize our client files and much of our report generation.

Demands for service from Emerald are increasing, as is the ethnic diversity of the clientele and the scope of issues that bring clients to us for assistance. Several times each week we encounter clients who speak little or no English; a subset of these are illiterate, even in their own language. We serve a large number of low income seniors and many younger persons who are receiving SSI or other forms of disability payments, in addition to those who are suffering temporary hardship because of illness, accident or unemployment.

Good humor, sincere effort, and empathy (on both sides) more often than not make these obstacles surprisingly easy to work around. Starting each service day with worship, which includes a prayer for those whom we serve, sets the mood and the mode of client interactions. Each client is required to complete a re-registration form every fiscal year, and to sign in for every visit during the year. These requirements support both the auditing of our service activity and the generation of the statistics for the monthly reports mandated by Food for Lane County.  During the fiscal year which ended on June 30, 2008, the Emerald Pantry responded to 2777 claims for assistance made by 920 households. Although the average the average household made about three claims during that year, numerous households used the maximum number of claims, i.e., the 16 allowed during the fiscal year. (It should be noted that household size is defined by Food for Lane County to mean the number of individuals sharing food, and does not imply any other relationship between the parties.) Since the beginning of the 2005-2006 fiscal year, we have been required by Food for Lane County to refine our statistics to show the number of adults, and the number of children served.

The Emerald Food Pantry operates 52 weeks per year; however it is open only on Tuesdays from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. The Pantry is located at 439 West 1st Avenue in Eugene.