Volunteer
We’re Totally Volunteer Powered! See How You Can Help Provide Food Security For Our Community.
Join Us as a Volunteer
Come Spring Food Pantry is a volunteer-run, 501(c)(3) community food pantry located in Union, ME. We provide assistance to those experiencing food insecurity, ensuring access to fresh, nutritious meals for individuals and families in our community.
The Knox County Gleaners is also completely run by volunteers! So there are lots of opportunities to help. From in-pantry assistance, fundraising, and event planning to handyman work, construction, gleaning the fields, and more, we couldn’t do it without all of the time donated by our team.
If you’re interested in supporting Come Spring Food Pantry and/or the Knox County Gleaners by donating your time, please take a moment to check our Job Board to see what volunteer opportunities are currently available.
Celebrating Our Incredible Volunteers
We don’t know what we’d do without our dedicated team of volunteers! They’re all so awesome we thought we should reserve the space below to spotlight their dedication, and thank them for their care, and support. We hope you’ll return regularly to “meet” someone new and see all the ways our volunteers impact the community.
Volunteer Spotlight
You know that we love our volunteers: without them, Come Spring Food Pantry would not exist! We’d like to highlight another one of our long-term volunteers, someone with a deep history of community service, Lorain Francis.
Lorain started working with CSFP in 2018, back when the pantry, which began as a student volunteer project for the benefit of school students, operated in a single, small room in the Thompson Community Center; just down the road from where we are now. In the beginning, the pantry served about 18 families. (For comparison, we served 133 families in the month of May, 2026, alone!)
Fast forward to 2020 and the Covid-19 Pandemic: The population of people who turned to the pantry increased significantly, straining operations on many fronts. Lorain was one two individuals instrumental in locating a larger home for the pantry. We moved to this location (just off Rt 17 across from Union Farm Equipment) in March of 2021, where we still reside.
Lorain was also the founder of the Knox County Gleaners, which officially merged with the Come Spring Food Pantry in 2024. The Gleaners was started with a three-year grant from the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Group. The goal of the program is to help decrease farm waste and increase food security through the harvesting of surplus crops. These fruits and veggies are then given to those in the community at no charge through local libraries, senior centers, and food pantries, like CSFP.
Lorain’s history of community service also includes stints with Penquis and the AmeriCorps Seniors, the primary federal network for volunteer service connecting Americans aged 55 and older with local opportunities.
Lorain is currently the Chairman of the Come Spring Food Pantry Board of Trustees. She is thrilled to see how far the pantry has come in just a few short years. She shares that she’s most proud of this growth, our new home, the co-residency of the Knox County Gleaners, and our nearly completed commercial kitchen. (This kitchen was a key goal from the early days of the pantry and will allow us to cook for our neighbors, handle food in ways that were previously not allowed such as canning, offer skills training, cooking classes and more.)
We consider ourselves very fortunate to have Lorain as a key member of our organization. Truly, hers has been a life of service to the community, and CSFP is lucky to be a small part of that.
