Category: Chicago Food Pantries

Much Needed Updates to The Friendship Center Spaces

October 17, 2025

From October 29 – 31, 2025 The Friendship Center we will be closed and focused on deep cleaning and making much needed updates to our spaces. Since our remodel in 2022 and recent acquisition of our community space at 2709 W Lawrence, we have not closed for more than a day of pantry distribution to deep clean and beautify our spaces.

The Friendship Center is for the community, and we desire to make our spaces even more community-oriented. We have recently rearranged our pantry shopping area to increase the number of aisles and access to fresh food, pantry items, baby food items, and other household needs. Additionally, we have improved the back room storage and flow to maximize efficiency. During these three days we will focus on deep cleaning our pantry and kitchen, making small upgrades throughout, and repainting and reorienting our community space in 2709 W Lawrence.

To make all of these changes possible, we need your help!

Volunteer

We need about 144 volunteers between Oct 29 – 31 to make these projects possible. You can sign up by joining our Grocery Distribution opportunity and navigating to the shifts on Oct 29 – 31. Please be mindful to only sign up for painting shifts if you have prior experience painting. If your group is interested, please contact Ali Cassity at info@friendshipcenterchicago.org. All shifts are two hours long.

Purchase From Our Wish List

We need some items to upgrade our spaces and make painting possible. Check out our Amazon wishlist with items you can purchase and ship directly to us.

Additionally, we are accepting donations of gently used or new toys and books:
– Board books and children’s stories in any language
– Manipulatives: big piece puzzles, magnatiles
– Small cars/trucks
– Small plastic dolls like Barbie’s or Bratz
– Coloring books or drawing tablets
– Crayons
– Fidget toys
Please contact Lauren Diaz if you would like to donate toys or books at info@friendshipcenterchicago.org

Make a Donation

We’re seeking $2,500 to help cover the cost of paint, paint supplies, and other items needed to update our spaces. Make a gift today!

How Summer Hunger is Impacting Kids

It’s finally summer in Chicago! Kids in our community are free to play, explore, and have fun with their friends, but some will experience the “summer slide”. According to Feed the Children the summer slide happens when kids do not get the nutrition their bodies and minds need to keep developing and their abilities and knowledge regress instead of progressing over summer. 

For every four kids you see at the park laughing and playing tag, one will go home to a fridge and pantry with little to no food. 

It’s a sobering reality when we think about the fun of summertime and the mix of stressed-out parents trying to figure out how to provide enough nutritious food while struggling to make ends meet. 

Families that are enrolled in SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) have some help with paying for groceries, but during the school year, their kids are most likely receiving free or reduced breakfast and lunch at school. 

While this injustice is frustrating and saddening, you can help make a difference in the lives of families in our neighborhood. 

Through June 30, all donations up to $10,000 will be doubled, thanks to anti-hunger champions, Ted and Dawn Helwig for their match challenge. Every $1 = 16 meals. Make a difference with a gift, today.

The Friendship Center can provide a family with free fresh food and pantry items twice a month. There are no income requirements or address restrictions. We can also help families enroll in SNAP, Medicaid, and refer them to other local agencies for additional vital resources. 

Additionally, we need more friends to volunteer and help us serve the growing number of neighbors visiting the pantry every week. There are volunteer shifts every day of the week at various times. Sign in to the volunteer portal and select a time that works for your schedule.

We are grateful to be a part of a caring and generous community who seeks to alleviate hunger and help their neighbors whenever they can.

Welcoming New Executive Director, Nadia J. Jiménez

April 1, 2025

A Message from The Friendship Center’s Board of Directors:

The Board of Directors is thrilled to announce Nadia J. Jiménez as the new Executive Director of The Friendship Center, effective March 24th. With over two decades of experience spanning public health, business operations, development and administration, Nadia brings a wealth of experience to lead The Friendship Center and expand our support for Chicago’s northwest side communities.

Nadia comes to us most recently from Pro Bono Network where she served as the Director of Development, leading fundraising initiatives and establishing strategic partnerships. Some of you might already know Nadia from her early volunteer work at the pantry in the 1990s or have admired her recent leadership at Swedish Hospital as Director of Covid Response and the driving force behind the North Central Region Healthy Chicago Equity Zone.

Nadia brings heartfelt passion for our mission, extensive community engagement skills and a commitment to collaboration and inclusivity to her role as Executive Director.  The Board is excited about the opportunity to partner with Nadia to help shape the vision for The Friendship Center’s future growth, while ensuring the continued success of our current efforts to provide food and other vital resources to neighbors in need. 

We also extend our deepest gratitude to Justin Block for his dedication and leadership over the last three years, and to the entire team at The Friendship Center for their hard work in ensuring a seamless transition and uninterrupted service to our community. Together, with your continued support, we look forward to an exciting new chapter filled with even greater achievements for our community.

Learn More About Nadia
Connect with Nadia

Utilizing The Food Pantry Increases Buying Power for Neighbors

Neighbors shopping at the best free grocery store in town – The Friendship Center, are walking away with an average of $160 worth of groceries. This spring, one of our student volunteers, Cora W. price compared what our neighborhood grocery stores would charge for the food that neighbors select for free during their pantry visit.

As a student, Cora is not worried about paying for housing or food but she’s learning through her classes and volunteering at TFC, that affording life’s basic necessities is costly. Cora shared, “we did a budgeting activity last year in school. It was really helpful to see all the pieces we have to put together to live. The price comparison project showed me this as well. And if we can make the puzzle a little easier for someone, I want to be part of that.”

As Cora was doing her research at local grocery stores she noted, “how hard it can be to find food in a grocery store, especially if you don’t know the layout well. A well-organized list helps.”

In addition to navigating prices and layouts of grocery stores, all of us have felt our dollars getting us less and less food when we go to check out. Our neighbors facing hunger are no exception, Cora also noticed, “while doing the price comparison project and seeing just how much food costs right in front of me, it was hard to imagine spending this much money on what I eat every week.” Your investment at The Friendship Center through donating, volunteering, and raising awareness helps alleviate neighbors from their tight budgets and allows them to redirect the $160 – $320 they are saving to other costs like utility bills, medicine, childcare, and beyond.

The Friendship Center has continued to serve more neighbors in 2024 than ever before, with a 35% increase compared to last year. To continue to provide access to fresh food and vital resources we rely on volunteers and donations to meet the needs of our neighbors.

A Message from Our New Board Chair

It has been my privilege to serve on The Friendship Center board for more than twelve years, and during that time, our organization has grown and evolved in ways we could not have imagined. We have expanded our boundaries, changed locations, grown our programming, and even added pets to the list of clients we serve. We have been overwhelmed watching our neighbors and supporters respond each time we see a need or new opportunity to help those in need.

One day, I hope that organizations like ours will no longer need to exist. Food insecurity is a burden that no family deserves to experience. Not knowing where your next meal is coming from weighs heavily on your daily life and affects how you make decisions for yourself and your family. Our work is not just focused on providing food but also on providing the peace of mind that comes with having your family’s basic needs met. That is why at The Friendship Center, we have remained steadfast in our mission for more than 50 years.

As we reopen our doors on our beautiful, newly renovated space this month, we are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to expand our reach and continue to serve our community. The dedication of our staff, donors, and volunteers gives us the confidence to keep dreaming, growing, and serving clients each day.

This summer, we invite each of you to join The Friendship Center in fulfilling our mission by volunteering, making a gift or donating to our “Restock Our Shelves” food drive which ends June 17th. The Friendship Center depleted our inventory in preparation for our renovation, but now that we have reopened, we need your help to restock the shelves for our food insecure neighbors. Any non-perishable food donation is appreciated, and can be dropped off at the following locations before June 17th:

Davis Theater, 4614 N Lincoln Avenue

Fresh Street, 6191 N Lincoln Avenue

33rd Ward Alderwoman Rossana Rodríguez‘s Office, 3001 W Irving Park Road

Now more than ever, we understand how unpredictable life can be, but together we can assure our neighbors that we will always be here to help.  

-Sarah Zimmerman, TFC Board Chair

About the Author:

Sarah Zimmerman works as the senior associate director, annual giving at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. With more than 15 years of experience in nonprofit fundraising and management, she is responsible for driving strategy for the Law School’s annual fund and legal clinic. As a member of the board, Sarah supports The Friendship Center’s fundraising strategies, communications and strategic planning efforts. 

Food Waste Reduction Efforts at The Friendship Center

Earth Day is April 22, and Stop Food Waste Day is April 27, so it seems like a perfect time to highlight the issue of food waste and the ways that The Friendship Center is working to reduce wasted food while improving service for our clients.

Food waste has enormous environmental, ethical, and economic impacts. According to ReFED, a whopping 35% of all food in the U.S. was either unsold or uneaten in 2019, representing $408 billion worth of food. When food is wasted it also wastes all the land, water, energy, labor, and love that goes into producing it. And when food decomposes in landfills, it generates greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change. In fact, food waste accounts for 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

This level of food waste is happening at the same time that 1 out of 6 Americans struggle with food insecurity. Within The Friendship Center’s service territory, 1 in 3 people, or 66,000 of our neighbors, are food-insecure.

While there are many systemic reasons for this disconnect, food waste is a solvable problem. The EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy suggests that beyond source reduction (prevention), the best option for reducing food waste is to Feed Hungry People, which, of course, is our mission at The Friendship Center.

The Friendship Center currently rescues and redistributes unsold, high quality food from a handful of local retailers to augment our inventory. Donations include meat, fresh produce, dairy, baked goods , and shelf-stable items.

Even more exciting is that with our new grants from Swedish Covenant Hospital and the Greater Chicago Food Depository, The Friendship Center is currently renovating our facility.  Increasing our cold storage capacity and acquiring a new van will allow us to significantly expand our food rescue efforts and increase the amount and variety of culturally-relevant foods we can offer our clients.

Farther down the Food Recovery Hierarchy is composting, which is one more way that The Friendship Center is working to reduce food waste. Composting is a way of recycling food scraps and turning them into a nutrient-rich soil amendment. Foods in our inventory that go past their prime, as well as food scraps from our hot meals prep, are placed in toters out back and collected weekly by a compost collection service.

The Friendship Center is looking forward to expanding our food rescue efforts in the future– for the health of our neighbors and the health of our planet.

 – Susan Casey

About the author:

Susan Casey has served on The Friendship Center board since April 2021. She is the Zero Waste Schools Program Manager at the nonprofit Seven Generations Ahead, where she works with K-12 schools to reduce waste. Susan is a member of the Wasted Food Action Alliance and the Illinois Food Scrap Coalition.