Food Basket holds open house

Two decades after it began operating - and almost 11 years after its founder and now namesake passed on - the Orville Standup Memorial Kateri Food Basket is still going strong, helping community members in need of food, clothes, and household items.

“I just want to say thank you to the community, surrounding communities, and organizations for supporting us for the last 20 years, keeping our doors open to help our community members that are having a hard time,” said Cory Rice, the Food Basket’s coordinator and Standup’s grandson.

Rice spoke of how much the operation has grown in two decades, from a small space in the St. Francis Xavier Mission, with plastic bins for food for 10 people, to a somewhat bigger space in Nolan’s Mall, to its current location by the Old Malone Highway.

Last month they gave out big boxes of food to 120 clients, in addition to serving meals and branching out to having non-food items available for those who need them.

In the past the organization was funded solely by personal donations, but now they also have support from Moisson Rive Sud as well as monetary donations from many of the charitable events in town, including its own golf tournament, which will hold its 12th edition in the summer.

Rice’s wife, Andrea Montour Rice, their daughter Macy, and Cory’s mother Kelly helped with the open house activities, which also included a half-and-half, trivia questions to win Food Basket-branded prizes, and a lunch catered by Messy Kitchen that consisted of a corn soup, strawberry juice, and meat pie, with a commemorative cake made by Brittany Zachary-Standup.

Looking back, Rice is proud of how far the Food Basket has come in two decades.

“When I took over almost 11 years ago, I wasn’t thinking it would be where it’s at now,” said Rice.

With an eye on the future, he said that his next big project would be, eventually, to have a permanent space that the Food Basket owns, instead of renting.

“This is big, but it’s not set up the way we need it to be,” said Rice. “I’m grateful for what I have, we make it work. But in the near future, we need to expand to our own place.”

Specifically, Rice would like a bigger kitchen space, to be able to prepare meals more often than once a week, and for more people, while giving them a space to eat and be social.

“Some people that come in, they live alone. Some are elders. They want to hang out, have somebody to talk to. So, if I had a nice common area where they come in and somebody else comes in, then you have somebody to talk to,” said Rice.

The number of people who come to use the Food Basket’s services has steadily increased over the years, Rice said, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic and generalized rises in cost of living. The 120 boxes they distributed last month were the most they had ever given.

“It’s getting to the point where people are coming in between baskets, where they don’t have enough still. That’s why, in the front, we have extras of whatever we can provide,” said Rice.

The Food Basket will keep helping them as much as they can, and Rice hopes there will come a time when the Food Basket will be less busy - because everyone will have enough to feed themselves and their families.

[email protected]