Community Comes Together in Time of Need

November 12, 2025

By:

Tamara Lee Titus

Local food banks help the community.

Cutline: Chewelah Food Bank volunteers. Photo by Tamara Lee Titus.

“This community is very generous, very generous,” said Tiane Shoemaker, executive director of the Colville Volunteer Food & Resource Center. “They are seeing a need, and they don’t want their fellow community members going hungry,”.

Six volunteers filled boxes for their outdoor market, assisted families, and organized stock as clients lined up outside, while Shoemaker led a tour of the facility. “We have 15 volunteers altogether,” she said, “with currently no need for more.” The help that they do request is mainly financial, because, “with money we can go and purchase exactly what we need,” she said. For those with food donations, she offered, “We could use eggs, canned goods (canned fruit mostly) and holiday items: flour, sugar, baked goods, stuffing, boxed scallop potatoes, anything and everything.”

Tiane Shoemaker Colville Food & Resource Center. Photo by Tamara Lee Titus.

Shoemaker reported, “We get stuff from local stores [Grocery Rescue], Second Harvest & Northwest Harvest. Our TEFAP [The Emergency Food Assistance Program] commodities come from the Arden Warehouse Rural Resources.”

Numbers have increased lately at food pantries throughout the area, according to not only Shoemaker, but also Tina Rubio, director of Kettle Falls Community Chest. “Both us and Colville, our clients have [almost] doubled. I talked to [Shoemaker] the other day and she said she went from 250-280 up to almost 500. Ours have gone up from 160 to 220, just this last month. We got 31 new families this last month,” Rubio said.

“It’s been crazy. Monday, we actually had a line going all the way down the street! I think they’re panicking; that’s what’s happening,” Rubio added.

Shoemaker reported, “We have people coming from Republic. We used to do six to 10 boxes a day, now we are doing 28 boxes. In two days, we had 17 new households sign up.”

Chewelah echoed similar conditions. “We had the busiest day we have ever had today, and I’ve been here 15 years,” stated Bill Steuber, Chewlah Food Bank board member and volunteer. “It was just crazy busy today.”.

When asked what was needed for donations, Steuber said, “Money or hamburger, but mostly money.” Money is requested especially due to damage recently discovered in their eastern wall. “It needs $56,000 of structural repair and we don’t have the money. We’re trying to get a grant,” he said, adding, “We just found out about [the damage] a week ago… Merry Christmas.”

These three local food pantries/food banks are not doing Thanksgiving boxes this year. Steuber explained, “We don’t do turkeys anymore; we haven’t for years. So, we give out $30 gift cards, to buy a turkey or whatever. I don’t know if everybody heard that this was the first day we’d be giving them out, but we had 20 people in line at 9 a.m.”

In Kettle Falls, Rubio said, “No Thanksgiving boxes; what we are handing out is Thanksgiving items throughout the month. We will have some turkeys, but not like we normally do. We used to put together boxes, it would take two days to put all these boxes together, people would pre-sign-up. Then, half of them wouldn’t show up. We would have to unbox all the boxes… it got to be a lot, so we decided, ‘Let’s try this a different way and see if this works.’ Because we do have a couple of businesses that would donate a bunch of turkeys and stuff like that.”

Rural Resources division director Aja Bridge summed it up with, “[The local food pantries] are so busy and overwhelmed with day-to-day work, they gotta just keep it going instead of trying to do something really different for the holidays.”

Rubio elaborated, “We are an emergency food bank, so our goal is to feed people for two to three days. We do a lot more here than that. We also provide personal hygiene items and pet food; little things. We are always telling donors that we can take personal hygiene, laundry soap, dish soap, any of that stuff. And we can take it in big containers because we break it all down and make it in smaller containers too, to give away. We can use ziplock bags, we use a lot.”

She also emphasized financial donations and shelf stable items such as chili, soup, canned fruit, tuna, any type of protein, and cold cereal. Rubio said she posts regularly on their Facebook page listing their current needs.

Becky Esvelt, Kettle Falls Community Chest volunteer and board member, added to the list of items needed: “Things their kids can cook for themselves.”

Explaining why financial contributions are helpful, Rubio continued, “We prefer money because I can get discounts that other people can’t. They can’t walk into the grocery store and say, ‘I’m buying donations for a food bank, can I get a discount?’ I can walk in and say, ‘This is for the food bank. What kind of discount can you give me?’”

Becky Esvelt & Tina Rubio Kettle Falls Community Chest. Photo by Tamara Lee Titus.

The three nonprofits expressed their gratitude for the community’s help. Rubio said, “The community really has stepped up; we have been getting some really good donations.”

Steuber also acknowledged donations from the community have increased over the last three years; “I am happily shocked,” he said.

Rubio mentioned that they could always use more volunteers; “We’re always rotating them somewhere, and we are always looking for extra drivers,” she said.

In Chewelah, Steuber reported, “We have enough volunteers, but we could always use some reserves. For the most part, we like to have some people that help out when people are down. You don’t want too many people in here, because it’s small and you’d be running into each other.”

Rural Resources is also a key player in providing food where it’s needed. Bridge added that, regarding their role in the distribution of resources, “We are a food bank for the tri-counties [Stevens, Ferry, and Pend Oreille]. We receive food that comes from the state, and then we distribute that out to our tri-county partners. We also are the re-distribution organization for some of the larger statewide hunger-relief partners like Second Harvest and Northwest Harvest; we are receiving food from all these different organizations here in Arden…We re-package…and then we deliver that out to our food pantries. We also bring them Grocery Rescue from Walmart.”

Mark Lauth Rural Resources Arden Warehouse Worker. Photo by Tamara Lee Titus.

In explaining the bigger picture of the resource allocation, she stated, “A lot of pantries have many sources of food, [for example] they might do their own Grocery Rescue, they get their own donations, and then they get the food from us. So, they are all trying to do the best they can with food that comes in from all these different sources.” According to Bridge, there are 17 food pantries in the tri-county area and those are all listed on their website, along with food drives and drive-up events, such as those offered by Second Harvest.

“We also have our mobile food pantry, which is direct client services. We go out to very rural areas that have limited food access, and we set up a mobile food pantry right there and people can get the food for free,” she stated.

“We are hosting a drive up event on Nov. 19, which is not something we normally do, but we are trying to just help meet the need,” Bridge continued. “Knowing that there’s so much demand already at the pantries, we will have a drive up food giveaway right here in Arden, at the Warehouse, so hopefully, this will help.” This event will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at 657 Elm Tree Drive according to their website.

Bridge explained the increased need due to the impact from the federal government shutdown and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits being cut. “Even before the shutdown, everyone was already seeing an increased need. So there were already higher client visits, people struggling with increased costs and everything else. That is not going away. It’s consistent across the state, since 2020 the numbers just climbed every year. This state normally releases numbers to compare client visits at pantries and, for the first time, they released numbers comparing east side to west side of the state, rural and urban, and they showed that rural areas and eastern Washington are being impacted the hardest.”

“And we have the least amount of food,” added Alaina Kowitz, Rural Resources community and outreach manager.

“The $2.2 million that Governor Ferguson announced is great, wonderful, yet our three counties get a really small piece of that. We’ll use it to buy extra food, but it does not in any way replace SNAP or compare to the gap,” Bridge said.

Kowitz elaborated, “For our fifth congressional district, it’s $32 million of SNAP [cut], so $2.2 million across the whole state is like a drop in the bucket; it doesn’t fill the gap.”

Regarding the increase in numbers in Chewelah, Steuber said, “I don’t know if it’s because SNAP money is running out…I don’t know if that would be what’s making the difference because most of the people on SNAP shop here anyway.”

According to Shoemaker, “What happened is that during the pandemic, SNAP and EBT went to their maximum level, and our clientele household dropped way down. Now that things have shifted, and they’re not losing their SNAP funding, it went back to what it was normally – except for this month because of the congress, [government shutdown] it was delayed. It’s going to eventually fall, but it depends on congress.”

Regarding the governor’s support, Shoemaker said, “Washington state is putting out $2.2 million to the food banks. I am actually classified as a pantry. I don’t get that directly; it goes to Rural Resources, Northwest Harvest and Second Harvest. Those big distribution centers are the food banks.”

Shoemaker continued, “If you are in another community, catch up with your local food pantry and see what they are in need of. Everyone is seeing an increase right now in neighbor helping neighbor.”

Kowitz said, “If people wanted to donate to Rural Resources to redistribute out to the food pantries, the Ag Trade center is accepting food donations on our behalf. We will pick them up or the Colville office has a drop off box.” Upcoming food drives are listed on their website. “We will also accept funds that can be specified for food purchases,” Bridge added. As indicated on a sign in their Nutrition Warehouse in Arden, 1,103,032 pounds of food was distributed to their tri-county partners last year.

Bridges emphasized, “It is the communities that I think are going to help everyone get through this. It’s everyone jumping in together, the churches, the faith-based groups and the schools, who are looking out for the kids…but it’s going to be a whole community effort.”

Kowitz added, “Even if the government opens up next week, people will still be impacted past that. This shut-down will really have a ripple effect in the coming months, so I do think it’s important for community members to know that even if, and when things open back up again, local support is really needed through the new year, if not longer. Any support that folks can give is really appreciated and needed.”

For more information:

Colville Volunteer Food and Resource Center

https://colvillefoodbank.org/

210 S. Wynne St.

Colville, WA 99114

(509) 684-2971

Kettle Falls Community Chest

https://www.kffoodbank.org/

472 Meyers Street

Kettle Falls, WA 99141

(509) 738-2326

Chewelah Food Bank