Kelly and Greg Ptacek saw a need in the community. Kelly works with children and sees first-hand how food insecurity affects children right here in Wayne. On Easter, the Ptacek's, who own Johnnie Byrd Brewing Company, paired with Pac 'N' Save to offer free meals. After word got out about that, Greg said people began to contact him to see how they could help. Greg said Kelly suggested a mini food pantry, and got to work from there.
"We wanted to make ours a little bit more robust than a lot of other people. Most of the ones that I've seen are like one by one and then it's just some spaghetti and some canned food in there," Greg said. We wanted to go big and wanted to over design it."
That "over designed" pantry is vented to stop things from getting too hot in the summer and will have a heat source in the winter.
"The idea came from how can we help like long term? When we were doing Easter meals, there was a car that drove by six times just trying to like rationalize to themselves 'do I need that?'," Greg said. "One of the things that we really want to do with this is like undo the stigma behind (using a food pantry)."
The Ptaceks are asking for donations to be non-perishable items not susceptible to mold. Nothing homemade should go into the Byrd House. They're also asking for items to be kid-friendly if at all possible.
On Johnnie Byrd's website, there's also a link to donate monetary funds to the little pantry.
"The way we're going to operate it is give what you can, take what you need," Greg said.
Shelf-safe donations can be dropped off directly in the Byrd House pantry or into the brewery and funds can be dropped in the business or online at johnniebyrd.beer/birdhouse.html.
"We would like to see five to 10 touches on it a day. I think that'll really help us. Right now we just really want to focus on undoing the stigma behind need," Greg said. "We want somebody to be able to touch that birdhouse and other people to not know or judge, you know, whether it's somebody that's dropping off something or somebody that's grabbing something out of there."
Kelly, Greg and their children have helped create the Byrd House and Greg said they're excited to see their pet project get underway.
