Seeking growth through creating less need

Lorenzo Alba Jr. would like to see fewer people walking through the doors of Casa de Peregrinos. That might seem like a strange goal for the executive director of Doña Ana County’s largest food pantry, particularly at a moment when Casa is expanding its reach across the county, adding facilities, vehicles, employees and partnerships to serve more people, but Alba sees no contradiction.

“I love it when we don’t hit our numbers,” he said.

Casa routinely estimates how many people it expects to serve, numbers that become part of grant applications and commitments to government partners. But if Casa projects serving 18,000 people and only 17,000 show up, Alba doesn’t consider that a missed target.

“That means less people are needing to come see me,” he said. “It’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.”

For now, however, plenty of people still need Casa. And increasingly, Casa is going to them. A permanent food pantry in Hatch that dramatically increased the number of families Casa could reach is being expanded and renovated. A new facility in Sunland Park is expected to open later this year, with Chaparral next in line. Three new electric vehicles funded by Oracle will take food into communities where transportation itself can be an obstacle.

In Las Cruces, Casa has hired its first social worker, while plans are moving forward for a new soup kitchen for longtime partner El Caldito. Beyond that, Alba envisions community kitchens that could teach job skills and potentially help someone who arrives needing food eventually create a business of their own.

Taken together, the projects represent something larger than growth. Casa is trying to change where it fights hunger and, perhaps more importantly, how.

“The vision has always been to try to kind of attack, if you will, the food insecurity issue through infrastructure,” Alba said.

Hatch showed him what that could mean. Before Casa established a permanent pantry there, it operated three mobile distributions in Hatch, Garfield and Rincon. Alba said the three combined served no more than about 175 households.

The permanent Hatch location now serves 500 to 600 families every month. The lesson wasn't that mobile pantries didn't work. Casa still uses them and is investing in them. It was that putting a permanent presence in a rural community removed another barrier between families and food. Now the Hatch facility itself is growing.

Doña Ana County recently committed $150,000 toward renovations that will include walk-in refrigeration and freezer units, a new HVAC system and drive-up capability. Hatch High School students will paint a mural at the pantry, which will also honor the legacy of former Hatch Mayor Slim Whitlock, a longtime advocate for the facility.

Alba points to the project as an example of how Casa increasingly gets things done. The work combines congressionally designated funding from U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, state capital outlay, Doña Ana County funding, the Village of Hatch serving as fiscal agent and a partnership with Hatch Valley Public Schools.

“This is how you make a difference in the lives of our neighbors struggling with food insecurity,” Alba said in announcing the county funding.

About 70 miles south, Casa is taking what it learned in Hatch and applying it on a potentially larger scale. Construction on a roughly 4,000-square-foot Sunland Park pantry is expected to be completed around the end of October, with an opening possible in November or December. Alba said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham contributed $1.7 million in capital outlay toward the project.

Casa has served the area with mobile pantries, but Alba believes a permanent facility can dramatically expand that reach.

He estimates 500 to 1,000 families could use the pantry each month initially, with the number potentially growing to 1,500 after the first year. And the Sunland Park pantry isn't really just for Sunland Park. Santa Teresa, La Unión and other communities are nearby, creating a service area that extends well beyond the city itself.

“Those people in that part of the county are going to be able to have a place to call their own and come out,” Alba said.

The goal is to make the new pantry a smaller version of Casa's Las Cruces operation rather than simply a distribution point supplied from the main facility. Roadrunner Food Bank will deliver there. Casa expects to purchase food specifically for the southern part of the county and hopes to develop food-rescue relationships with retailers in the area, similar to its Las Cruces partnerships with Walmart, Albertsons, Target, Natural Grocers and Sprouts.

But Doña Ana County is large, and Alba knows Casa can't build a pantry everywhere.

Sometimes the building still has to move. Oracle funding recently allowed Casa to purchase three electric vehicles, including a pickup truck, to expand food deliveries and its Mobile Food Pantry program.

“Sometimes the biggest challenge isn’t finding food, it’s getting it,” Alba said when the purchase was announced. “Transportation and lack of infrastructure in our county has long been an issue.”

The electric component was also intentional. Casa uses solar energy at its Las Cruces headquarters and maintains a zero-food-waste policy. The vehicles add zero-emission transportation to that effort.

But their significance to Casa goes beyond how they are powered. The vehicles are one of the tangible results of a new relationship between Casa and Oracle as the company and its Project Jupiter partners make investments in Doña Ana County. Earlier this year, Oracle and other Project Jupiter partners also provided support for Casa's Pop-Up Pantry events.

For an organization accustomed to piecing together support from government entities, grants, local businesses and community donors, Alba said having a corporate partner of Oracle's size is new territory.

“We’ve never really had corporate partners that large,” he said. “So, it’s a new thing for us.”

Alba doesn't try to make Casa part of the larger debate surrounding Project Jupiter. He evaluates the relationship through a narrower lens.

Can it help Casa buy food? Can it allow Casa to employ more people? Can it help the organization reach communities it hasn't been able to reach before?

“I think that’s been the case so far,” Alba said. “We put the mission ahead of everything.”

He said Oracle representatives have also volunteered, visited Casa and spent time learning how the organization operates. That mission, though, is changing in another way.

At the same time Casa is getting bigger, Alba is telling his staff to slow down.

Over the years, Casa has become very good at efficiently moving a lot of food to a lot of people. Alba doesn't want that efficiency to come at the expense of understanding why someone needed to walk through the door in the first place.

“We’ve already turned into the big monster where we serve a lot of people really, really efficiently,” he said. “Now let’s go back to where we started.”

And that means listening. A family coming for groceries might also be struggling to pay an electric bill. Someone may qualify for SNAP but not be enrolled. Another person may need help finding health care, childcare, mental health services or WIC.

Casa has provided referrals and connections to those kinds of services for years. It administers the City of Las Cruces utility assistance program and works with churches, nonprofits and other agencies when someone needs help Casa can't provide.

This year, however, Casa added something it has never had before: its own social worker. The position gives Casa more capacity for case management and more opportunity to understand what is happening in a family's life beyond the immediate need for food. There isn't necessarily a complicated screening process behind it.

“Most of the time, people share a lot,” Alba said.

Staff members have to know how to ask questions, but perhaps more importantly, they have to know how to listen.

That desire to do more than fill an immediate need is also behind one of Alba's more ambitious ideas. Casa is currently focused on developing a new soup kitchen on the Community of Hope campus that will eventually become the new home of El Caldito. The two organizations remain separate nonprofits, but Alba said they have worked together for decades.

Casa and its partners have secured roughly $5 million to $6 million toward the project, with Alba estimating it will take about $7 million to $8 million to get construction moving.

Once that is finished, Alba wants to begin developing community kitchens.

The idea is part workforce development, part business incubator and part extension of Casa's food mission.

Alba describes someone walking in with a salsa recipe or a cookie that friends and family have always told them they should sell. A professional could help determine whether the recipe can be produced commercially without changing what makes it special. A business incubator could teach the person how to market it, build a business and sell online. A commercial kitchen and trained workforce could provide a place to actually make the product.

Potential partnerships could include Doña Ana Community College Culinary Arts, New Mexico State University and Las Cruces Public Schools culinary programs.

Alba has looked at models including Three Sisters Kitchen in Albuquerque, where food and entrepreneurship are combined with workforce development.

“We’re all about building wealth in the community,” Alba said.

The idea was reinforced for him during the pandemic by a conversation with a substitute teacher who also waited tables. The man explained that substitute teaching allowed him flexibility to be available for his children while restaurant work provided additional income. More importantly, he had learned enough restaurant skills that he had another way to earn money whenever he needed it. Alba kept thinking about that conversation.

“We need to prepare people to have that option of a secondary income or to make a choice and say, ‘This is what I want to do for a living,’” he said.

The kitchens could also serve restaurants that need commercial space and provide food-production capacity during emergencies. Alba believes the community kitchens and soup kitchen together could potentially produce enough food to feed 100,000 people in a week if circumstances required it.

There are still more buildings in Casa's plans.

After Sunland Park comes Chaparral, where an original plan to build from the ground up didn't work out. Doña Ana County is instead working with Casa on the possibility of renovating a community center into a pantry. Alba anticipates work could begin in 2027, with an opening in late 2027 or early 2028.

It will be another place to distribute food, another way to reach people who have trouble reaching Casa. But if Alba's larger vision works, the buildings and vehicles are only part of the story.

One family may need Casa to come closer. Another may need someone to help navigate SNAP or health insurance. Someone else may need a second income, a marketable skill or a place to turn a recipe into a business. Casa is preparing to serve more of all of them. Alba just hopes that, eventually, some of them won't have to come back.

“If we don’t hit the numbers and they question it,” he said, “I’m the first one to remind them that it’s better if we don’t hit them.”

For a food pantry expanding across Doña Ana County, perhaps the ultimate measure of growth isn't how many people Casa de Peregrinos can serve. It's how many it can help reach a point where they no longer need to be served.