Started in a church basement. Still run by neighbors.

In the winter of 1987, the mill on the Clearwater cut a shift, and a handful of families at St. Brendan's started leaving bags of groceries on the basement steps for anyone who needed them. By spring the steps weren't big enough.

Today the pantry fills a converted feed store behind the Grange hall, shares groceries with about a thousand households a year, and is run entirely by volunteers: retired teachers, high-school students earning service hours, and plenty of people who once came to the pantry themselves.

We still work the way we started. Anyone in the valley can come. Nobody has to explain why. And every can on the shelf got there because a neighbor put it there.