Jodi Donley was once a food shelf shopper. She said she was treated with respect and dignity, never shame, never judgment.
“Those moments when you’re not treated as less than, they change families’ lives, they changed my life,” she said. “Those family meals, they caused us as a family to want to become a family that could always have food to eat.”
For her, that feeling of worthiness became a catalyst. She promised herself that when she could, she would pay it back. She went from being a shopper at the food shelf to becoming a volunteer, and today, she’s serving her community as manager at the St. Peter Area Food Shelf.
Donley says listening to shoppers has shaped every decision since. When a Spanish-speaking translator resigned from the food shelf, the Spanish-speaking community left too. Next it was the Somali translator, and again, the community followed.
Donley reached out to pillars of each community and invited them into the food shelf for a walk-through to talk about what was working and what wasn’t.
“We changed a lot of things here in order to get better results, but we couldn’t get those results until we talked to them,” Donley said. “We have learned through great experience here that communication is key. It goes both ways.”
She sees the impact of that work in the faces of shoppers as they walk through the door.
“We’re just making our neighbors feel welcome when they come here,” she said. “Communication, communication — it’s the only way. You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Alongside learning creative ways to capture shopper voices, Donley credits FFEN’s Strategic Food Sourcing Analysis — a “health check” offered to food shelves every six months — with showing her where the site wasn’t meeting community needs and how to source food that would.
“(FFEN is) instrumental and vital and crucial to making sure that my people are getting the healthiest, best options for them and their families,” Donley said.
When Donley began, one of the food shelves’ top spends was laundry detergent, and orders were placed based on what volunteers had scrawled on a whiteboard in back. The produce shelf held 10 to 20 items.
“It was so inadequate,” she said.
With coaching from FFEN, Donley learned how to place orders for free and low-cost foods through the regional food bank, and to prioritize what shoppers want most: fresh produce, protein, dairy, and eggs.
“FFEN was my first tool and it’s the tool that we still use today,” Donley said. “We were spending so much money on the wrong things.”
Now, when a challenge comes up at the food shelf, Donley turns to FFEN’s insights and combines them with input from shoppers themselves.
With support from FFEN, the food shelf:
- Reduced spending on non-food items and prioritized fresh produce, protein, milk, and eggs that shoppers want
- Strategically placed orders to reduce costs and increase low-cost and free food from its regional food bank, including more produce and protein
- Expanded its relationships with community partners to bring in more rescued food that’s still safe to eat but can no longer be sold in stores
- Listened to shoppers to better understand the foods and experiences that matter most to them
