Along the coast of Lake Superior and across the street from Woodland Park Campground in Grand Marais, First Lutheran Church hosts Helping Hands Food Pantry. This modest pantry and its hardworking volunteers oversee a monumental effort of bringing resources to their community.
The pantry’s coordinator, Kay Powers, who has helped there for over 15 years, says that the pantry fills a big need in the tourist town in the Central Upper Peninsula.
“When the (summer) tourists leave, everything slows down,” Kay said. “Between then and the snowmobile season, things get pretty rough for people. Even in this day and age, when people are working one job, maybe two jobs in the service industry, they’re still not getting by because it’s very expensive to live here.”
To get food to Upper Peninsula pantries, food bank semi trucks make multiple runs each month to drop-off sites throughout the Upper Peninsula. Our agency partners travel to the drop-off sites to get the food and get it to their pantry. For the volunteers in Grand Marais, this entails a round trip of 70 miles twice a month to pick up food at our Germfask agency, Christ’s Fellowship Ministries.
Local volunteer Andrea started serving at the pantry in fall of 2025. She gives her time while also working on her family’s farm and community-supported agriculture initiative. In addition, she is helping to bring other vital resources to Grand Marais, such as dentistry and veterinary services. Kay and Andrea also regularly discuss ways to raise money to bring more fresh products to the pantry, like eggs and cheese.
“Part of the reason that I decided I wanted to be a part of the pantry is, not because I have time, but because someone needs to keep it open,” she said. “It’s important to have resources for people. This year, it saved a lot of people in town.”
Andrea herself utilizes the pantry’s resources from time to time, especially when it’s difficult for her to travel several miles from Grand Marais to a larger town with a grocery store. And although her family farm started out as a resource to support her own health, it quickly became something more. In addition to nourishing people through her work at the pantry, Andrea has discovered the profound impact of nourishing community through volunteerism.
“Every experience that you have with a person changes their day,” Andrea said to describe volunteering as a whole. “I do believe that putting yourself in situations to help people makes a huge difference in our world, in your world. The presence that you bring— just being there to be part of something bigger changes our world.