PITTSBURG – The number of people served by Wesley House in the months of May and June was the largest in the ministry’s 44-year history.
And July looks to follow suit.
On a recent Wednesday, 38 households were at the Pittsburg First United Methodist Church ministry to receive food.
“We were completely slammed from the time we opened at 12:30 to open our food pantry at 1. There were 20 people waiting to get in. It was just completely busy the entire day, maybe the busiest day we’ve ever had,” executive director Matt O’Malley said.
Several factors come into play, said O’Malley, who has been at Wesley House since November.
“The cost of goods is high and continues to rise,” he said. “That should be the main reason we’re so busy. Federal assistance programs that help people out with food are on the chopping block, and so that has a lot of people feeling pretty uneasy about what their home pantries look like.”
Through arrangements with five Pittsburg grocery stores, 15,000 pounds of food is “rescued” per month, O’Malley said, mostly produce, breads and desserts.
“It’s stuff we’re not able to order from the state food bank, but we’re really, really happy to be able to distribute, especially the fresh produce,” he said.
Taking any of the leftovers also means Wesley House is in line for non-edible items as well, including Fourth of July decorations recently and a pallet of bags of plastic grass the weeks after Easter.
“We don’t say no to anything from the stores,” O’Malley said. “We take it.”
In one of several changes since O’Malley took over, a newly remodeled food pantry has more of a supermarket look, and clients are given a list of items they can choose from rather than a one-size-fits-all option.
“There’s something to be said about people getting to choose the food they go home with rather than just giving them food,” he said. “We know that’s going to eliminate or at least reduce waste.”
Another change was to add Sunday hours to access the food pantry, eliminating one weekday.
“If you work, it’s difficult to get out here during food pantry time in the afternoon,” O’Malley said.
Uncertainty about federal aid for food distribution, and how that trickles down to places such as Wesley House, is a concern, O’Malley said.
“What we’re sort of waiting to find out is, at the federal level, is the government going to stop subsidizing state-run food banks?” he asked. “They may, or they may at a lesser level than they are now. That would greatly impact our buying power.”
Pantries purchase items from food banks at a discount, he said.
“If that goes away, those deeply discounted rates we’re able to buy food at, we will have to either spend a lot more money on food or serve less food,” O’Malley said, adding the solution would probably be somewhere in the middle.
Wesley House, “by far the largest food pantry in the county,” O’Malley said, served 420 households or 1,035 individuals per month 2025 – a 57% increase from 2024.
Through a grant from the Kansas Health Foundation and its Hunger Free Kansas initiative, all of the food distribution centers in Crawford County will convene to discuss their challenges and brainstorm creative solutions.
“We’re curious to hear from the other players in the area,” said Rev. Daniel Reffner, senior pastor of Pittsburg First. “Are they seeing an increase in folks coming in their doors? We can have a conversation about what’s going on in our community and other ways to address it.”
Reffner arrived in Pittsburg a year ago this month and was told shortly after that the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, which had provided trained social workers and an in-house manager at Wesley House, would be vacating the facility in mid-November, turning operations back over to the church.
“First Church got a lot more oversight of Wesley House,” Reffner said. “It had been passed back to us when we had passed it to CHC for a couple of years. It’s a transition I think is going well.”
Among the changes made, besides the food pantry, was eliminating the day shelter program for the unhoused and the night shelter during cold weather. Other churches in Pittsburg have offered their facilities for both.
“The environment we have here is much more welcoming and calm,” O’Malley said. The former day shelter space is being converted to a resource room. The unhoused are welcome to be inside the building during its open hours.
“It’s going back to what it is meant to be here at Wesley House, which is the best food pantry we can possibly be. It’s our main focus,” O’Malley said. “We still serve the unhoused population, and they’re still allowed to come in here and exist. But we’re not a day shelter anymore, and that allows us to really focus on the food pantry.
“It’s sort of returning to the Wesley House of old,” he added.
The shift in management also brought more involvement from his church, Reffner said.
That included a Lenten study of the book “The Gifts of Imperfection” by Brené Brown, which was also the subject of Reffner’s sermon series.
“We mixed two populations of people,” O’Malley said. “There were the folks from the church, who were already planning on taking this book study class, and Pastor basically let them know we’re going to do this at Wesley House instead of church. We were able to advertise it to our food pantry clients and unhoused populations.
“It went so well, and we were able to focus and have some deeper conversations about faith and why we believe the things we believe,” he added. “It was pretty neat to bring back faith-based programming and now we want to do more of that – have community meals followed by some sort of study.”
About 45 people attended each weekly book study.
“That was a really powerful experience for me, and what was so cool about it that there were probably 10 to 15 of our unhoused friends each night,” Reffner said. “Some of them came for the meal and would sit on the side and not always participate. Throughout those six weeks, every week there were one or two more people at the tables and they actually participated, which seems like a low bar for participation, but it was so cool to see First Church people engaging with people over here.
“We love this place, we talk about this place, but not everybody at First Church has intimate relations with people here,” he added. “To have our food pantry guests and unhoused friends actually contributing to the conversation and being in the mix with First Church people – this is something I’m sure hasn’t happened for quite some time.”
O’Malley added, “It’s really powerful when you mix together two populations of people, not just to gather but to break bread together. To sit down, have a meal together and talk about faith together.”
When Wesley House opened in 1982, it began its life as a separate missional church, and Reffner said that spirit returned with the book study.
“This is a return way back to what it used to be,” he said. “This might not be a church again, but it’s a place where we can include that faith-based element because it hadn’t been there for quite some time.”
Hunger and homelessness are nothing new in Pittsburg, said O’Malley, a native of the city of 20,000 who spent all but a few years living here, and a veteran of several nonprofits in the area. Thirteen of the 16 counties in the southeast corner of the state are constantly on the list of the lowest incomes in Kansas.
“People would be surprised at some of the troubling statistics in southeast Kansas,” he said. “It’s not just Crawford County, but this corner of Kansas that was expanded by coal miners, then all the coal mines shut down and all of a sudden, a huge chunk of the population didn’t have jobs. We are several, several generations into that reoccurring poverty.”
Moving to the area surprised Reffner, a Wichita native.
“This corner of Kansas almost feels forgotten in some sense. … This part of the state feels disconnected. We identify as being part of the Four States Area, and a lot of people associate more with Joplin than with Kansas City or Wichita,” he said. “We’re here in the corner doing our own thing. That’s been interesting to me as somebody new coming in here.”
O’Malley has plans for the future of Wesley House, including, if a six-figure grant request comes through, establishing a community garden on the grounds and hiring a gardener to manage it.
“They can grow a silly amount of food,” he said. “With pretty minimal effort, it’s really not that hard to do.”
Crops grown in the garden would be determined by a poll of food pantry users, who would be welcome to work at the site.
“We think it would be a wonderful volunteer project and a way for people who benefit from the project to get involved,” he said.
Any talk of the future, O’Malley said, is clouded by uncertainty from Washington, D.C.
“We are in strange times when it comes to grant funding,” he said. “Nothing I’ve ever experienced in my 14 years of nonprofit work has been like the cuts there are now, and some government-funded opportunities you could almost count on coming back year after year don’t exist or have been cut drastically. What’s available in the world will determine what we do at Wesley House.”
To alleviate the uncertainty of funding and to give Wesley House its first fundraiser in recent memory, a phone-a-thon is planned for Wednesday, Aug. 6.
For two hours, Wesley House board members and Pittsburg First volunteers hope to contact 500 people to see if they will give a suggested $350 – the amount it takes to run the food pantry in a day.
“It’s something we haven’t done a lot of in my experience here, just raising funds just for Wesley House,” Reffner said. “We’re hoping and praying that’s a fruitful experience and something we can do each year.”
O’Malley has had success with phone-a-thons for The Lord’s Diner of Pittsburg, where he previously worked.
“You can raise a lot of money in a pretty short amount of time,” he said. “Year One of a phone-a-thon is a challenge. Year Two of a phone-a-thon, you have all the people who gave last year and new names. By year three, four and five of a phone-a-thon, it’s a pretty well-oiled machine and you can almost count on the donations to come in.
“We are helping more people than we have ever helped before and that means we need more community support,” he added.
Contact David Burke, content specialist, at [email protected].