OXFORD, Ohio — The Thanksgiving family feast is right around the corner, but groups helping feed families are seeing a bigger need and not just for food. 

What You Need To Know

  • The executive director at TOPPS food pantry in Oxford says the amount of people in need for food has quadrupled 

  • Families coming there for help also are in need of housing so they teamed up with a social service agency to help 

  • They plan to build a bigger building with federal funds to help more families in need 

Sherry Martin is stocking up for what she knows is going to clean out all the pantry shelves.

“I don’t think people realize how labor intensive it is to try to get enough food for 300 households within three days in the week,” said Martin.

She runs TOPPS, a food pantry in Oxford and she says the need for help with food has been on a steady increase for the last two years.

“We’ve seen the pantry numbers quadruple. When I first started here, we’d serve about 12 households a night, 15 households a night and right now, we’re getting close to 50 households per night,” said Martin. 

But she says it’s not just food that people are coming in asking for.

“When people come to the pantry, a lot of times they’ll tell us ‘I’m having trouble paying rent,’” said Martin. 

Nicola Rodriguez has file cabinets full of families, kept confidential, who need food and housing.

“Definitely inflation. The housing crisis has definitely affected our families,” said Rodriguez. 

She’s the social services director. They teamed up with the pantry to provide wrap around services and she says the need is growing on their end too.

“This is such a wide district, and it’s so rural that some of the outlying areas, and not everyone knew about us or our services, but it has definitely grown,” said Rodriguez. 

It’s part of the reason they’re about to expand. In a spot right behind the two buildings, there are plans for a new building. 

More than a million dollars they’ve received in federal money will go here to fund a bigger building, but the money can only be used for the building. When it comes to the food, they’re relying on donations to help more families in need.

“The most important thing that we do is to serve our community and we need to make sure that we are sustainable so that we can be here to help them,” said Martin. 

The executive director says the food pantry hopes to break ground on the new building in January and be up and running out of the new space within a year.