AUBURN — A food pantry that serves as many as 300 families each week is looking for a new home.

“I’m waiting for God to open another door,” Lynn Casavant, the director of the In His Name Food Pantry in Auburn, said. “He opened this one.”

For almost three years, the Lewiston woman has operated the food pantry in a back corner of the Good Shepherd Food-Bank. However, a three-year agreement to use the space in the food bank is nearing an end.

“We’re not throwing them out or anything,” Rick Small, executive director of the Good Shepherd Food-Bank, said. “We can extend the agreement. But it’s better for them and it’s better for us if they find somewhere else.

“Frankly, we could use the space,” Small said. The pantry now occupies an aisle that sits in a kind of canyon between 60-foot-high warehouse shelves.

Casavant would also prefer to move.

She imagines expanding the pantry to include clothes and medical screening, needs she sees in the people who come for aid.

“We literally run out of food to feed people sometimes,” Casavant said.

The food pantry was created by the food bank, whose mission is supplying low-cost food to hundreds of Maine agencies. For years, it had bartered work from volunteers, paying them in food.

New federal statutes took away the ability to barter for food, and the pantry was opened as a way of helping the hungry people who had relied on the help.

Demand grew more than predicted.

“We hadn’t counted on the economy,” Casavant said. “It’s not poor people anymore. It’s middle class.”

Poor families manage to reach the food bank despite the fact that it’s located miles from a population center, on the Hotel Road near the Auburn-New Gloucester town line.

Some people have cars. Many get to the pantry by carpooling.

Casavant interviews every new person who comes to her door, located in the rear of the food bank.

“People say, ‘I’m so embarrassed, but I don’t have any food tonight,'” she said.

To help, Casavant has marshaled a small army of volunteers, now numbering about 200. They include lots of people who help in the food giveaways. But they also include counselors and nurses.

Among the foods she has available are items that are gluten-free or sugar-free. She also sets aside food for the special diets of cancer patients.

“But you know, most needs are not just food related,” Casavant said. She tells people who come that they can talk about why they are having a rough time.

“Guess what, you don’t have to be by yourself,” she tells them.

Casavant trusts that the community will provide a space, whether it’s in downtown Auburn or in a nearby community.

“I will go wherever God takes us,” she said.

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