Emily Benner, vestry member of St. Stephen’s & The Vine Episcopal Church in Ferguson, Missouri, and special helpers harvest green beans for the church’s biweekly food pantry. Photo: Teresa Danieley
[Episcopal News Service] For more than 50 years, St. Stephen’s & The Vine Episcopal Church in Ferguson, Missouri, has operated a food pantry to help feed its community. As living expenses and the city’s poverty rate increase, more people in north St. Louis County are turning to the ministry, which runs Tuesday and Saturday mornings, for food assistance.
Like many other Episcopal-run food pantries nationwide, St. Stephen’s & the Vine’s food pantry began serving more low-income people than usual last year after the federal government made cuts to its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The cuts impacted millions of people.
The church was already struggling to keep up with the food pantry’s growing demand when this summer it suffered a “financial crisis” after both of its HVAC systems simultaneously broke down and needed to be replaced. In response, St. Stephen’s & the Vine’s part-time transitional priest, the Rev. Teresa Danieley, set up a GoFundMe page in late July to keep its shelves stocked with fresh and nonperishable food and personal care items.
“Before the SNAP cuts, we were probably serving around 50 people on a Tuesday morning and more people on a Saturday morning. Now we’re serving at least 75 people each day we’re open,” Danieley told Episcopal News Service. “People can’t make ends meet because they don’t have adequate wages; they don’t have adequate housing; they don’t have adequate health care. Our food pantry is their stopgap.”
Danieley noted that the food pantry is the church’s most expensive outreach ministry to operate.
St. Stephen’s & The Vine Episcopal Church in Ferguson, Missouri, operates a biweekly food pantry. Photo: Teresa Danieley
St. Stephen’s & the Vine has raised $19,150 through GoFundMe as of Sept. 17. Based on current food costs and not counting additional emergencies, the money raised so far can at best keep the food pantry open for 38 weeks, or 9.5 months, according to the ministry’s operational expense average of $500 weekly.
As of 2024, 24.2% of Ferguson residents live below the federal poverty level, higher than the national rate of 10.2%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For decades, the city has faced deep-seated housing instability driven by historic racial segregation and discriminatory public policies.
“I’ve been in and out of jobs, and it is minimum wage, so even though you get a paycheck, it’s still usually not enough once you pay rent,” Renne Leon, a Ferguson resident who visits St. Stephen’s & the Vine’s food pantry, told KMOV, St. Louis’ CBS affiliate news station, in an August interview.
Missouri’s 2026 minimum wage is $15 per hour, which is more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
More people have also been relying on St. Stephen’s & the Vine’s Clay Café for free community meals twice a month. The volunteer-run community meal ministry is open on the third Tuesday morning of the month for brunch and on the third Sunday of the month for dinner. On average, about 40 people are served brunch and 75 people are served dinner monthly. Like the food pantry, the Clay Café runs on donations, costing an average of $250 monthly for brunch and $400 monthly for dinner.
The church has ongoing partnerships with nearby churches and organizations, including Episcopal Church of All Saints and Ascension in Northwoods, which operates its own food pantry. And parishioners from St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Florissant have donated fresh vegetables harvested from the church’s Good News Giving Garden.
“It’s mostly seasonal, of course, but we try to offer fresh produce whenever we can to help supplement people’s meals,” Danieley said.
Danieley and church staff have been working to build additional partnerships in and out of Ferguson, including a newly formed food pantry coalition in St. Louis. The church also has been communicating with local Eagle Scout troops to potentially work together to build bigger storage space for shelf-stable food.
“We’re thinking about the long-term sustainability of the food pantry,” Danieley said.
Sustaining the food pantry and Clay Café is personal for Danieley, who has a professional background in worker justice advocacy. Before she began serving St. Stephen’s & the Vine, Danieley spent eight years working for the nonprofit Missouri Jobs with Justice.
“We have to make this work,” she said. “We need to keep our doors open for the wider community. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a building sit here all week, only to be used for a few hours on Sunday?”
–Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.
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