ABOUT

Let’s take a look at our history…

Joyce Uptown Food Shelf began in 1969 when Rev. Marks, the Joyce United Methodist Church pastor, began helping neighborhood families with bags of groceries. Soon after, Rev. Grover integrated the makeshift foodshelf into Joyce Church, with members of the congregation serving as volunteers. In the fall of 1968, Joyce UMC purchased the building at 1222 w. 31st street with money from the memorial fund and from the builder’s club of the United Methodist Church Union.

The name “Joyce Uptown Food Shelf” was adopted in late 2004, with the approval of the Joyce church council on December 7, 2004. The previous name had been “Joyce Emergency Food Shelf.” the name change was warranted by the increasing recognition by the uptown and SW Minneapolis business community, a result of the relentless fundraising efforts of the uptown rotary club, who have taken the food shelf as their mission since 1989 and who continue to provide evening staffing every Thursday.

What We've Achieved

in 2023 we served…

  • 38,882 individuals

  • 11,603 households

  • 15,120children

  • 2,299 first-time clients

  • and distributed 797,714 lbs of food.


A deeper dive into data from Matthew:

Hey all, I am sure you all have felt and seen the increase in need at Joyce this year. I wanted to do a bit of a dive into data over the past 4 years to highlight the changes we have seen.  


All that information that we input into Pantry Saver can be pulled in any form and configuration we like.  I generally like to focus on four main data points that we are able to track day to day, and month to month: 

Pounds: the amount of food that we distribute 

Households: the number of households we served 

Individuals: the number of people in each household 

New shoppers: the number of people who walked through our doors for the first time ever.  

For this, I have pulled data from the first three months of the year from 2021-2024. A note that we expanded hours in April of 2021, so those from 2021 are a bit lower.  

Households: Households and Individuals are closely related data. As you can see in 2024 we are up 214% from 2021 levels, and 84% over 2023. Individuals are up 91%, in part because of the increase of large families who have led to much of our overall growth in the past 12 months.  

Pounds: We have seen a 145% increase in food output from 2021, and a 34% increase over 2023 numbers. The discrepancy between the Household increase and the Pounds increase can be explained by the enormous increase in emergency bags, which limit the poundage significantly. A family of 7 on average will leave with 175lbs of food when shopping, compared to 50lbs when receiving an emergency bag.  

New Shoppers: This has been the biggest growth item over the past 4 years, especially over last year, rising 107% since 2023.  This is mostly due to the increase in asylum families from Ecuador who are here legally, but aren't allowed to apply for a work permit until 150 days after they apply for asylum, making them rely heavily on social services.  

Moving forward:  

This year has started out really hot, and we expect the trend to continue. In conversation with other food shelves in Minneapolis, these numbers are not an outlier but rather are consistent across all food shelves. We are anticipating distributing over 1,000,000 pounds for the first time.  

We can't thank you all enough for helping keep our operation running and ensuring people in our community have the food they need. We will continue to try and find ways to serve more people while doing our best to maintain a level of intimacy and calm that our shoppers look for.