After a small-town church in a rural part of New York launched an ambitious $1.5 million project a decade ago, one of the early things it did was turn down a third of that amount from the state.
“What I tell people is, do you want to know what your vestry is really made of? If you want to know, throw a half million dollars in the middle of the table and say, ‘so, I think we shouldn’t take this money. How about you?’” said the Very Rev. Laurie Garramone, the longtime rector of St. John’s Episcopal in Johnstown, a town of 8,000 people about 45 miles northwest of Albany.
The funds were intended to improve the infrastructure for the church’s food ministries. The people of St. John’s had operated a food pantry and a Sunday lunch program in their cramped, poorly insulated basement for more than three decades. The narrow concrete stairway deterred people with mobility issues, and the kitchen equipment was 30 years old.
So they bought a building across the street in 2013 — a three-story structure that formerly housed both a YMCA and a post office. The purchase price of $80,000 sounds like quite a bargain, but the building needed a lot of work: a new roof, new windows, accessibility improvements, flooring, plumbing, and more.
The initial $1.5 million cost for the project ballooned over the years to $2.4 million, because of delays, fundraising challenges, and pandemic-induced inflation. But the food pantry held a ribbon-cutting ceremony August 5, after moving into the wheelchair-accessible first floor of the building now known as One Church Street. The lunch program is still across the street in the church basement, but if the necessary funds can be raised, it will eventually move into the elevator-accessible second floor of the renovated building.
So why did St. John’s take a pass on $500,000 from New York State? “We had to turn it down because the requirement was that we could not do any ministry in this space for seven years,” Garramone said.
The decision was not made lightly. “We actually brought in a Christian arbitrator to sit with us as a vestry, to ask us what the goals were for the building,” Garramone said. One Church Street also houses the church offices — “there’s no separation of church and food.” The vestry started off sharply divided, but eventually agreed unanimously to turn down the grant.
“The $2.4 million was raised from, you know, the $5 that somebody threw in a jar all the way up to the $250,000 that we got from a local grant,” Garramone said. The parish raised $1,000 by asking people to bring their change jars to church.
“And one man who comes to the meal every Sunday, he said to me, I want to write a check to your program, because my friend Paul can’t come downstairs, and I want Paul to have this meal,” Garramone said.
It wasn’t a large check, but the widower’s mite will go toward the additional $1.5 million needed for phase two: renovating the second floor with a modern kitchen and a spacious dining area. St. John’s hopes to rent the third floor to a nonprofit organization that can pay to renovate the space to the group’s specific needs.
Food for the food pantry and meal program comes primarily from the Northeast Regional Food Bank in Latham, an Albany suburb. The programs are run by a roster of 150 volunteers drawn from St. John’s and from community groups throughout the area.
Garramone is hard-core about this feed-the-hungry ministry. To develop her leadership skills and network with like-minded people, she pursued a doctor of ministry degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory University. She graduated in May, with a thesis titled “A Theology of Nourishment: From Basement to Banquet Hall.”
Her thesis describes why Fulton County, where Johnstown is located, needs the services St. John’s and One Church Street provide. “Fulton County’s self-reported food insecurity among adults stands at 25%, which means that 1 in 4 adults identifies as having limited or uncertain access to nutritious food. This is more than double the national food insecurity rate,” she wrote.
“Statistically, our Pantry numbers have exploded. In the month of January of 2020, prior to the pandemic, our Pantry served 98 people in a total of 63 households. In January of 2024, we served the highest number of people: 644 people in 242 households, an increase of 557%, and a 284% percent increase in households served.”
“I came to ordination a little bit later in life, in my 40s,” Garramone said, after a career as an English professor. “And when I came into ministry, I did not know that we shouldn’t do big projects, or that we should be nervous about them,” she said.
“It is in fact possible to raise $1.5 million — and we will do it, on behalf of the kingdom of God. So I would love to hear more churches ask, why not?”
