”Coming through!” Brandi Wynne said as she carried a large box of ketchup bottles.
Wynne is joined by several other volunteers as they unload a truck full of donations in front of a red church. It's only four degrees as they work off a remote county road in Red Feather Lakes – a mountain town west of Fort Collins.
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Around 5,000 pounds of food are being brought into the basement of the church, where every shelf and table is packed to the brim with fresh veggies, meat and toiletries. This food pantry is run out of the church building by a local nonprofit, and hundreds of people rely on it every Friday afternoon.
“This is the miracle that happens every week,” 72-year-old pantry volunteer Doug Race said. “Isn’t it something? Organized chaos.”
Despite the cold, a long line starts to form. Several people wheel up their wagons to go in for groceries.
Rural isolation can drive community needs beyond food
Around one in five Coloradans feel left out or isolated, according to new state health data. Those rates are slightly higher in Larimer County.
In Red Feather Lakes, “neighbors” can be over a mile away, and cell signal can be spotty to nonexistent. But as people wait at this food pantry, they have the chance to connect – about their health, about family updates and life in general.
“It was wicked cold, but people will still stand in line and they talk to each other,” Darlene Kilpatrick, the food pantry organizer, said. “Some of them say, ‘This is the only time I'm social.’ Being as isolated as we are, it tends to build more community.”
Kilpatrick started the food pantry in 2020. She estimates they’ve served over 2,000 people across rural parts of Larimer County – from Bellevue all the way to the Wyoming Border.
Small towns here are spread out. There’s no busy downtown area in Red Feather Lakes. There are a few local businesses, like a library and a restaurant, but there are few places to catch up.
“They just sometimes need someone to talk to and someone that cares,” Kilpatrick said. “So part of it is just not feeling alone and them creating relationships with each other.”
Jeff Johnson feels that way all the time. He’s lived just outside Red Feather Lakes since the 80s. He came up here to heal from a traumatic brain injury. But Johnson is unemployed and doesn’t attend a local church. The need for food, but also isolation, drove him to the food pantry.
“I'm recovering on the mountain by myself alone,” Johnson said. “I think there's a lot of lonely people on our mountain. It's a small community, so there's not a lot of gathering places.”
He’s been volunteering and hanging out. He recently met a good fishing buddy.
“Andy, one of the last guys here, I try to help them close every time, because maybe we can go fishing afterwards,” he said, smiling.
Now he feels like he’s part of a group. It’s helping him with his anxiety, and he looks forward to going there every week.
“This is a real central place for me in the community. These are my friends. These are my family,” he said. “These are the people that check on me and make sure I'm doing okay through time. There's people that I see here that I don't see anywhere else.”
Community connection inspires public health leaders
The food pantry has made this church basement a community hub. That got the attention of Larimer County health officials. Loneliness has been on their radar after their own community health assessment revealed a need for more belonging. Jo Buckley saw the pantry as an opportunity.
“I don't know where any of our county resources would have an easy time tapping in what they offer all residents, if it weren't for spaces like this, like the food pantry,” she said.
They got feedback that people wanted a space to talk to each other. So Buckley created the Connection Cafe at the pantry last May. She sets up a tent with chairs, brings coffee and shares helpful resources: like radon testing kits or therapists to talk about mental health. In the case of this cold day, she moved the cafe upstairs to the church’s fellowship hall.
“(We’re) making it more of a holistic approach and building good relationships for connection, versus just dropping off some flyers and leaving,” Buckley said.
With few central meeting spaces, people in this community can be hard to reach. Buckley has heard from many people that coming to the pantry is their one and only outing of the week. She wants to get to know residents and what they need. She’s heard about everything from access to vaccines to help with heat in the winter.
“So many people slide through the cracks in a way we don't know and understand,” she said. “That's not the opportunity or how any county resident should be treated.”
But the Connection Cafe – and the food pantry – could be in jeopardy. Federal funds were frozen late last year. Some grants were looking for new and innovative ideas, not something consistent. Pantry organizer Darlene Kilpatrick said you can’t always depend on local funds as a backup plan.
“You don't know if you're going to get a grant, you don't know what they're going to give it to you for,” she said. “And sometimes it takes months to get the money.”
After scrambling, she cobbled together funding from Provecho Collective (formerly the Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger) and the county to keep the pantry open for the year. Community members are grateful for it.
“I know people that say they didn't have a job, they were barely getting by, or something happened that their business fell through, and they're like, ‘You guys were a lifeline. We couldn't have made it without you,’” she said.
But Kilpatrick hopes she never has to shut down this resource that has brought so many people together – for food and connection.
