The food shelf on North Winooski Avenue has been under construction for a renovation and expansion during the past a year and a half. The reason? It has become the permanent home of an adjacent program that offers additional services to homeless people.
But now, even as the construction nears completion, potential spending cuts in Montpelier threaten the future of the combined enterprise.
Since 2021, staff of the Community Resource Center, a day shelter for homeless people, have shared the Old North End building with Feeding Champlain Valley, which operates a food shelf where anyone can seek assistance.
This partnership has become the state’s largest day shelter. Together, the organizations provide a weekday hot meal service while also connecting diners with social workers and doctors. They also offer essentials such as camping gear and services such as haircuts. Homeless people can use the place to spend time without having to pay for anything or being questioned.
The community resource center opened in the Burlington Holiday Inn in 2020 as an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic after congregate homeless shelters were closed. When the challenges of the pandemic gave way to a growing affordability crisis, the day shelter began to redefine itself. The Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity and Feeding Champlain Valley, which oversees food shelves throughout the region, brought their complementary services together under one roof — a former auto repair garage in Burlington’s Old North End where the food shelf has operated since the 1990s.
For the first years of its operation, the city paid for the resource center, but the state has footed the bill since 2024. Gov. Phil Scott has proposed cutting that funding, which would leave it short $650,000.
“If we don’t secure the funding that we need, we’re going to have to close,” said Brenna Bedard, CVOEO’s homeless outreach services director. Feeding Champlain Valley’s food shelf and hot meal service would remain but without the resource center’s complementary services.
If we don’t secure the funding that we need, we’re going to have to close.
Brenna Bedard
On a recent Tuesday, pieces of Tyvek still peeked out in places on the building’s exterior, but inside, clients found an inviting atmosphere. Those who wished to eat had a spread to choose from: cold-cut sandwiches, fresh fruit, steaming-hot vegetable cacciatore, sweet potato purée, waffle-cut fries and blueberry pie. At each table, diners engrossed in conversations paid no attention to the muted television set to a news channel. Early March sunlight poured in through the street-facing windows. The ambience felt like that of a community center or a church basement.
Tanya Aube has been homeless for nine years. She won’t stay at the overnight shelters in the city, so she and her husband sleep outdoors. She works when she can but never earns close to enough for an apartment, let alone utilities.
Aube avoids most public places, such as the cafés and restaurants on Church Street where, she said, the homeless are often treated like “a disease.” She prefers the resource center, where it’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. She and her husband can watch TV or just relax without being treated like pariahs. Above all, they can get a warm meal there five days a week.
She particularly enjoys the scrambled eggs. Unlike eggs that are the watery scourge of some breakfast buffets, these, she said, are fluffy and filling.
“The chef does them really good,” she said. Between 9:30 and 11:30 a.m., Monday through Friday, the food shelf draws up to 150 people through the doors. Social workers and housing coordinators follow.
“A large portion of the people that we serve struggle with mental illness and substance abuse, and so they’re just very resistant to anyone trying to help them,” Bedard said. But once they show up to eat, “we build relationships with people. We build that rapport, and people start to trust us.”
The combination food shelf and resource center is a central part of Feeding Champlain Valley’s battle against hunger, but it is also just one node in its expanding mission.
“We’ve evolved from what was essentially a soup kitchen providing breakfast every day to serving over 77,000 meals across the region last year,” said associate director Anna McMahon, noting that the org distributed 2 million pounds of food over the past year.
McMahon traces the evolution of Feeding Champlain Valley back to March 2020, when the pandemic lockdown changed the world overnight. Suddenly, the organization’s market-style, take-what-you-need food pantries were unsafe to operate, just as the need for food assistance was about to grow. The group pivoted quickly to pre-boxed delivery or curbside pickup. Wary of the potential food waste this system could generate, the organization created its first online ordering system, which has survived the pandemic.
The intensity of need ebbs and flows. Demand surges in the winter and around the holidays in particular. Feeding Champlain Valley operates 27 food distribution sites and four food shelves in Addison, Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties, according to McMahon. The program served more than 12,000 people last year, completed more than 2,000 deliveries and saw nearly 36,000 visits to the food shelves. Its expansion across multiple counties prompted a rebrand from Feeding Chittenden to Feeding Champlain Valley in 2024.
At the food shelf in Burlington, one of the group’s busiest, meal production supervisor Charlie Desseau has to build a menu each week from what the community has donated and what Feeding Champlain Valley has purchased — usually from local farmers.
Desseau plays a complicated game of “Top Chef,” in which the ingredients are chosen for him and he designs the dishes. With his team, he cooks up nutritionally dense meals that balance flavor with the needs of his clientele, who may be dealing with untreated dental issues or mouth sores.
“As a chef, I really have to adapt what I’m cooking, and it doesn’t always come out as a specific dish,” he said. “If you were to get cacciatore in a restaurant, it would look a lot different than how we make it. But we use the ingredients that we’ve got, and we make something that’s flavorful.”
McMahon and Desseau emphasized that while they push heart-healthy, nourishing food, they don’t take a paternalistic view of how hungry people should eat. The Scott administration, on the other hand, has been considering restrictions to 3SquaresVT, the state’s assistance program for low-income Vermonters, that would prevent beneficiaries from purchasing “junk food.”
“You should have the freedom to choose what kind of food you want to eat, and it shouldn’t be that you have to eat carrots or a certain specific vegetable. Everyone needs a bag of chips sometimes,” Desseau said.
Today, this meal service is interwoven with the community resource center, which is essential to keeping the hot meals coming, according to Bedard.
Some legislators are pushing back on the proposed cuts. Rep. Theresa Wood (D-Waterbury) noted in a letter to the House Appropriations Committee that, in the past year, the center has helped 168 people transition from homelessness to stable shelter or permanent housing, connected 249 people with medical assistance, and distributed 729 pieces of survival gear.
Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak has called on the state to continue funding the community resource center, and CVOEO leaders recently met with House Speaker Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) to make their case. CVOEO communications director Jason Rouse said they were still waiting to “see what the pathway forward might be.”
Krowinski told Seven Days that she will continue to advocate for the Burlington center, which she called a “tremendous resource,” as lawmakers make spending decisions. She added, however, that it was “a really tough budget year with a lot of difficult decisions to make.”
As the debate over funding plays out, the need for the food shelf continues to grow. New federal work requirements for 3SquaresVT recipients went into effect at the beginning of March, making it more difficult to qualify for those benefits.
Feeding Champlain Valley expects that will mean making room for more at the table. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Food Plight | A combined community resource center and food shelf in Burlington just expanded. Now, some major funding is at risk.”
Correction, March 18, 2026: Feeding Champlain Valley was previously known as Feeding Chittenden. The program served 12,000 people last year. A previous version of this story contained errors.
This article appears in The Food Issue • 2026.
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