After years of vying for grants and permits, the Vashon Maury Community Food Bank finally broke ground Friday, June 20, at its future home at the Vashon United Methodist Church.

A crowd of islanders and officials — including U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal — celebrated the event with speeches and a ceremonial earth-striking.

“We are proud of this opportunity to partner with the food bank in serving our community, and we’re so thankful for everyone who helped to make this day possible,” Vashon United Methodist Church Pastor Patricia Longstroth said.

The move is a long time coming for the food bank, which has operated at the top of Sunrise Ridge for more than three decades. And it’s also the latest step on a journey by island social service providers to turn the Methodist Church into a community hub.

The food bank offers free grocery shopping, pick-up and home delivery for islanders and does not ask for proof of need. But its current home is outdated, cramped and difficult to access for those without a car.

The food bank first began the permitting process for its new home in summer 2023, and last month brought two huge breakthroughs for the organization. Within just hours on May 20, Food Bank Executive Director Emily Scott learned both that Governor Bob Ferguson had signed the state budget allocating $1.3 million for the project and that the food bank’s long-awaited county permits had been approved.

The organization will build a warehouse and grocery store on the grounds of the Methodist Church and has purchased an easement to take control of the church’s education building on the property for office space, which it will share with other local service providers.

Its new home on Vashon Highway is a much easier jaunt for seniors, those with mobility limitations, or simply anyone who doesn’t want to make the winding drive up Sunrise Ridge.

Food Bank Executive Director Emily Scott speaks at the ceremony. (Alex Bruell photo)

Scott thanked donors, Food Bank and Methodist Church leaders, staff and volunteers, and also praised county councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, who Scott said helped push the project through the county’s permitting process.

“Mosqueda’s office, I believe — we don’t know what happened behind the shadows — had everything to do with us getting our permits,” Scott said to applause from the crowd.

Scott said construction is scheduled to complete before the end of the year. The new food bank could be open for business by the first quarter of 2026.

The food bank’s project team includes Graham Baba Architects, project management from Jones Lang Lasalle, and construction services through Colvos Construction.

Jayapal celebrated the groundbreaking as an example of the “beautiful, loving” spirit of the island.

“Today is about celebration,” Jayapal said. “Since I’ve been in office, we’ve prioritized food banks, and we were so proud to get $800,000 for this food bank from the federal government … This is also a recognition that poverty and hunger are not personal failures. They’re failures of a government to provide just the basics for what people need.”

U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, holding an apple, celebrated the groundbreaking as an example of the “beautiful, loving” spirit of the island. (Alex Bruell photo)

Under one roof

The groundbreaking is also another step on the road toward transforming the Methodist Church into a “resilience hub.”

Resilience hubs are buildings that provide shelter from extreme weather or natural disasters, access to food, water and medical supplies, space for volunteers and aid organizations to work, and connection to reliable, sustainable electrical power. In everyday life, they also provide community needs — such as through the Food Bank or services offered through Vashon Youth and Family Services (VYFS).

For Vashon civic leaders, that work started with the food bank, VYFS, and the island’s Interfaith Council to Prevent Homelessness, groups that came together amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the Methodist Church congregation shrunk, mirroring national trends, facility space — particularly in the church’s education building — started going unused. They filled it with VYFS programming, such as its Oasis resource navigation and Family Place programs. Then, they struck the arrangement with the food bank to move in. Washington’s DSHS Mobile Office frequently comes to the church to offer islanders help, too.

Island activists and civic leaders including Hilary Emmer and Nancy Vanderpool “made a lot of this happen,” Walker said. IFCH served as a connector, building knowledge of islanders experiencing homelessness and their needs and gluing the various groups together through daily community meals, showers and other services.

Methodist Church leaders saw the greater opportunity to formally bring all these services together under one roof.

Like a grocery store with a built-in immunization clinic, “this is a centrally located, accessible, safe space for people to access resources,” VYFS Executive Director Jeni Johnson said. It’s also key on an island that must be at least partially self-sufficient.

“I’ve worked in nonprofit for 30 years,” she said, “[and] I’ve never seen the depth of collaboration that I have seen in this community. … We’re a rural, unincorporated island. … The last thing we need in an emergency is for folks to not know where to go for help.”

Though all this work is an evolution of the church’s role, Walker sees it as keeping in line with their faith-driven mission. “It’s our job to take care of the planet, and we need to do it in a just way,” he said.

This approach also helped the church secure crucial state funding.

Chris Lovings, community engagement specialist for the state Department of Commerce, tied much of the work at the church to Washington’s Building Communities Fund, which supports nonprofit facilities that serve low-income communities. That funding paid for solar panels on the Education Building roof and child care services in the church through VYFS, he said. And $1.3 million from that fund, approved this spring in the recently-passed state budget, boosted the Food Bank project.

“The idea is that this is one centralized location where commerce has multiple streams coming into place,” Lovings said at the ceremony. “There’s a perception that Vashon only has wealthy people. That could be nothing further from the truth. … There are people here who are a paycheck away from losing their homes. They’re under medical debt. They don’t have a place to stay.”

Green energy brought all the pieces together. Achieving energy independence and self-sufficiency during power grid outages helped the church be competitive for federal grants, Walker said — in particular, a group of grants crated by the Inflation Reduction Act.

“That’s what paid for everything we’ve done here,” Walker said, referring to the energy upgrades at the church.

It’s part of a broader trend to green energy independence on the island. As of 2024, Vashon has doubled its solar energy generating capacity over the previous five years, according to Puget Sound Energy data shared by island scientist Steve Bergman. “If we were a city, we would be in the top ten in the USA in terms of per capita solar generation,” he said in an email.

Solar panels cover the Education Building at the United Methodist Church. (Photo courtesy Eric Walker)

Upgrades at the church include a cold weather heat pump and solar panels installed this winter at the parsonage. They’ve also added solar panels to the Education Building, an electric vehicle charging station, and six powerful powerwall batteries across the entire church property. They just recently installed another new heat pump, too. The church now generates as much or more energy than it uses, and “the idea is that we have enough solar and storage to have everything going for three days,” Walker said.

Political activist and Indivisible Vashon founder Kevin Jones, who works on climate change issues, saw an opportunity to link Walker’s transformation of the church to the county’s work on climate change resilience and has advocated on that front.

King County’s 2025 Strategic Climate Action Plan plan details the county’s intention to identify buildings that can serve as such resilience hubs — naming Vashon specifically as a place to start. And in the recent update to the county’s comprehensive plan, an amendment proposed by Mosqueda encouraged the county to explore creating more climate resilience hubs.

Shelter space

Next for the church, Walker said, is hammering out details with the island’s emergency preparedness group VashonBePrepared, which may be ready by this winter to use the property as an extreme weather shelter.

Vicky de Monterey Richoux, board of directors president of VashonBePrepared, said it’s critical to have that kind of shelter on Vashon. Extreme heat or cold could threaten the lives of people without a home or adequate heating and cooling. A major earthquake or wildfire could destroy homes and leave islanders and tourists needing a place to sleep.

VashonBePrepared now has 12 volunteers who have completed Red Cross training and will use Red Cross protocol to run a shelter when needed, de Monterey Richoux said. Not only is the Red Cross system “wonderful,” she said, but it also means they can call for the help of a Red Cross shelter manager if they need staffing help.

The group still needs more volunteers, she said — those interested should visit vashonbeprepared.org.

The Methodist Church “is definitely on the list for potential use in the case of an emergency or extreme, severe weather,” de Monterey Richoux said. “We’re working on a memo of understanding [with] the church.”

They’re also planning exercises at the shelter. Their setup could only manage about a dozen people, “but that’s a dozen people who aren’t freezing or overheating,” she said. “Even one person lost is devastating to the community.”

Unlike previous locations used by VashonBePrepared for emergency housing, such as Maury Island’s Swallow’s Nest vacation rental, the church is conveniently located on a bus route in the middle of town. Plus, the Food Bank can help feed people staying overnight, and VYFS can provide them services. That structure “is a wonderful solution that’s a long time coming,” she said.

VashonBePrepared has already signed a contract with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to be reimbursed for up to $10,000 to provide shelter through the rest of this calendar year, de Monterey Richoux said.

“Last winter when we had an outage, I was really upset that we couldn’t open a shelter because we didn’t have our ducks in a row,” she said. “I’m pretty excited that this winter, it looks like we are going to be ready.”