Many years ago, when Jane Merrow was serving meals at a local soup kitchen, a couple came in to fill out paperwork to use the food pantry. Merrow chatted with them, but they refused any dinner or even a cup of coffee. They were so embarrassed to need food assistance. “They wanted to crawl under a table,” Merrow remembers. “They just wanted to disappear, and I thought, man, if I ever had my way, I would never make people feel like that.”
Now, she’s living up to that promise. Merrow is the co-founder of the First Parish Newbury Food Pantry, an all-volunteer pantry providing food to more than 750 people every Friday. “When we started the pantry, I said, we’re going to make it like ‘Cheers.’ Everybody knows your name and everybody’s welcome. And I think we’ve kind of done that,” she says.
They’ve done that and so much more. In 2025 alone, the pantry filled 15,619 requests for food assistance and distributed more than 604,579 pounds of food to people who live or work in Newbury, Newburyport, West Newbury, Salisbury, Rowley, Ipswich, and Georgetown. The First Parish Newbury Food Pantry came from modest roots more than a decade ago, when Byfield Community United Methodist Church closed and needed to find a new location for its food pantry.
“One of the people who had been helping with the pantry had all these boxes in his garage, and he was going church to church to say, can somebody take over the food pantry?” Merrow says.
She eagerly volunteered her own church, the First Parish Church of Newbury, for the task, since she’d always wanted to have a food pantry of some kind. Soon, they were clearing off a few shelves in the church’s little upstairs library for food donations. Every other week, Merrow and the pantry’s other co-founder, Sue Boccuzzo, took turns buying groceries to give away.
The pantry opened in December 2015 with three volunteers and a single guest on its first day. The following week, the pantry had no guests. But soon, word spread, not only among pantry guests, but also donors and volunteers. “When people found out what we were doing, they started donating money or donating food, and then we just kind of grew from there,” Merrow says. The pantry has grown exponentially since then, outgrowing every space it’s been in.
“We had people sitting in the pews waiting to shop, and we kept expanding,” Merrow says, crediting the church for enabling its growth. “They let me put refrigerators and freezers in the front of the sanctuary because we needed the space. We had storage in the balcony.” They made the visiting experience lovely, too, with musicians playing piano and autoharp.
“When people were sitting in the pews waiting to do their shopping, they could have a sing-along or hear live music,” Merrow says. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the pantry pivoted again, first switching to handwritten ordering and eventually to an online ordering system. Need exploded, too, with the pantry’s guests swelling from 150 people per week to 300 people per week. “We took over the whole church during the pandemic,” Merrow says. “I had every pew filled with food.”
Today, the pantry has expanded even more. In 2024, it opened an 800-square-foot addition with a large walk-in freezer, a cooler, and extra storage. Instead of Merrow and other volunteers shopping for food themselves, they partner with local organizations like the Greater Boston Food Bank, Our Neighbors Table, and Nourishing the North Shore for food and delivery support (although Merrow still purchases goods out of her own pocket every week).
They also rescue food from local grocery stories, bakeries, schools, and other businesses, distributing what would have otherwise been thrown away. In 2025, volunteers recovered 153,094 pounds of food that would have been discarded. In 2023, the pantry began partnering with the Triton Regional School District to open school pantries in nine local schools. The pantry was also selected to participate in a two-and-a-half-year study sponsored by Mass General Hospital and the Greater Boston Food Bank on helping pantry guests make healthier food choices.
In addition to fulfilling orders in person at the pantry, volunteers also deliver food every Friday to more than 170 households with transportation issues. Volunteers also call more than 130 households each week to help people who can’t order online.
What makes all of this even more extraordinary is that every single one of the pantry’s 250 workers—including Merrow—is a volunteer, working without pay, ever. The result is a food pantry that’s truly by and for the community. “It’s a big family, and I couldn’t be more proud of the people I work with,” Merrow says. “I don’t deserve the credit. All of my volunteers do. Without them, we could not do this. I am the luckiest person in the world.”