A recent visit to Forward Market, a partner pantry in Knox County, sparked a conversation with Jessica, the founder, about the history of the pantry and the way it operates.
“One Thanksgiving I felt called that people are hungry more than the holidays, and we should be feeding them more often, so that’s how Forward Market was birthed,” she says.
Read more from our interview with Jessica:
How did Forward Market get started?
“We used to feed every Thanksgiving — we partnered with the school systems here in South Knoxville, and we’d hand out 100 turkeys, 100 food baskets full of different sides, and pumpkin pies to families in need. One Thanksgiving I felt called that people are hungry more than the holidays, and we should be feeding them more often, so that’s how Forward Market was birthed. A few months later, that January, we started Forward Market.”
How did you handle such growth?
“I just take it day by day. Honestly, we didn’t know how many people [to] expect, but a few months after we started, we had this news interview that went viral, and then we got a lot of people, so it’s been word of mouth really. I haven’t ‘flyered’ or done anything. Hungry people tell hungry people where food is.”
Describe your relationship with Second Harvest.
“[In] November of 2022, someone told me about Second Harvest, [so] I reached out to Kendra, and things just progressed quickly. We launched [in] January, a couple months later.”
“I get food rescue — that started last year. It only started out as one Dollar General, and it’s just grown from there, so we get a lot.”
What do you get from Food Rescue?
“A lot of frozen meat, dairy, pastries, all sorts of yummy things that people love, but the frozen meat is what we really look forward to, because we need that.”
What went into your recent decision to add evening hours?
“We had a lot of families reach out telling us that they can’t make it because they work, so we wanted to give an opportunity for all the people that are trying to bust it and work for their families to be able to get food too, so we opened up Thursdays from 5-7.”
“I don’t think it’s clicked that we’re actually open yet because this will be our fourth week. The first week we served almost 400 people, but I really pushed it online, and I’m very careful about what I push online because we’ll have 600-800 in one day and I won’t have enough food for everybody.”
“I didn’t push it the next week and we served maybe 250.”
“As word’s catching on that ‘hey, they’re open in the evenings’ people are really loving it.”
How do you balance when to promote online depending on how much food you have?
“If I have a lot of food to push that day, I’ll just post early in the morning or the evening before, and I’ll be like ‘hey, we’ve got a lot of food,’ and post pictures. They always go viral, and we get a lot of people. That happened for us last week: we served over 600 on Wednesday.”
What does “viral” look like for you?
“Over 200 shares.”
How do you view your role in the “underserved” South Knoxville community?
“I actually feel like there’s a lot more pantries opening up now in South Knoxville, so I don’t feel like I’m the only one around here, but I do think that what we offer is different from all the other pantries, and that’s the client choice that we have here. My vision for the market was always to be a place that didn’t resemble a pantry, because I was a kid that went to pantries, and I want the parents now… if there’s any embarrassment or shame and they don’t want their child to know they’re going to a pantry, that the little kid just thinks they’re coming to a market, they never know that it’s a pantry.”
What positions do you offer for volunteers?
“Volunteers… there’s several positions, there’s restocking, there’s the refrigerator and freezer area where people hand out things to [neighbors] coming in, there’s tracking how many people we get for the day, there’s also bagging up. If we have tons of volunteers, we’ll have volunteers carry groceries down the stairs because we have a lot of elderly people who can’t do it. There’s always a role.”
How many volunteers do you need to function on a given day?
“I used to say a lot, I would say like six, but now we’re in a really good groove where we could handle just four.”
Do you have a lot of repeat volunteers?
“I do, that’s why I say I could do less, because in the beginning, they would be new, so no one would really know how to operate a job, whereas now I have so many repeats from UT and other volunteers that I get, that they all know every role, so they can manage a lot more at a time.”
How can people sign-up to volunteer at Forward Market?
“I tell people to just show up. I mean, unless you’re a student and you need to document hours through your university, you need to go through that program, but other than that, I just tell people to show up.”
Was Forward Market always client choice from the beginning?
“Always.”
Your social media presence has a large following and amount of engagement. What would you say to other pantries that are hesitant to start building that?
“I actually hate social media, so I’m not the person to ask that. I probably neglect it more than I should. People are very visual, so if you’re not showing what you have to offer, people will never know, so that’s why certain days — like we had tons of doughnuts today that I wanted to get through, and eggs as well, so I posted that, I was like ‘we have plenty of eggs, plenty of doughnuts, and plenty of other things,’ so people were like ‘oh, we should go to Forward Market today.’ We’re almost at 400 today, [and] had I not posted that, then we probably wouldn’t have seen that, so you need to post what you have.”
What drove your choice behind putting a lot of effort into the aesthetics of the pantry?
“It’s always been about bringing dignity back to people. When I think about you or I that might not necessarily need a pantry at this moment in our lives, when we go to Kroger or Walmart, no one’s asking us for our ID, our birth certificate, our address… we can walk through the store, grab what we want, and walk out with no questions asked, and that’s always what I’ve been about.”
“I want people to know that there’s no judgement here. I am just like you, and you are just like me, and we all need food.”
Do any favorite stories or memories come to mind?
“I had a lady come last year, and she was kind of hesitant about it all, and when she came up and we bagged her, she just started bawling her eyes out crying, and she just said that her husband left her, and she made a dollar above [qualifying] for food stamps. She was just really in a tough spot because she had kids. I walked her out, and then I was like ‘I need to give this lady money.’ We were Tuesday Wednesday… I said ‘we’re open, you can come every day we’re open… come tomorrow.’ She was like ‘I can’t, I don’t have gas money to get here tomorrow, this is all I have.’ So I gave her gas money. Anyways, never saw her again, and she messaged a week ago, and she was like ‘Forward Market blessed me, I had no gas, I had to pick up my kids from school, and no food.’ It was just really cool. To never see her again… you never know how much you impact someone and for her to [message] a year later, like ‘hey, I really did need that gas money.’
“Gary… he always tells us how we’ve saved his life. He doesn’t live in a house around here, so he needs food and water, mainly water. He’s just always talking about how much Forward Market has saved his life, and without it he would have had no food, because he has no job, no friends, no anything.”
Thanksgiving Preparations
Thanksgiving is a crucial time when families and friends come together for meals and fellowship, but it’s also a deeper picture of how much we depend on each other for strength and hope. At Second Harvest, we’re helping families year-round receive nourishment and hope for a better tomorrow.
Whatever your to-do list looks like for the week ahead, please consider what you can do to ensure everyone in East Tennessee can enjoy a delicious meal on November 28, and have enough for the holiday season. Then, make a generous donation to provide families experiencing food insecurity with all the ingredients they need for a joyful and memorable Thanksgiving Day.
Let’s put the power of community to work this holiday season and make this a Thanksgiving for All.
For more information on our Partner Agencies, please visit https://secondharvestetn.org/program/partner-agencies/ or contact Kendra, our Agency Relations manager, at [email protected].