After a Long Wait, Heart of the Hamptons To Open Its Doors on Meeting House Lane in a Few Weeks

After a long wait — including many appearances before various land-use boards, and even several lawsuits — Heart of the Hamptons, the community nonprofit organization that operates a food pantry and provides other vital services to families in need, is expected to move into its new headquarters in the old ambulance barn on Meeting House Lane in Southampton Village in less than a month.

Heart of the Hamptons Executive Director Molly Bishop said late last week that she doesn’t have an exact move-in date yet but was hoping to be set up on Meeting House Lane “in the next couple of weeks.”

“Everything is almost finished,” she said, adding that the elevator and work on the fire alarm system were all that remained to be done, before scheduling final inspections for a certificate of occupancy. “We’ve started moving over some equipment and shelving just to get a jump on making the transition. It’s pretty exciting.”

For years, Heart of the Hamptons has been operating out of the basement of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Roman Catholic Church on Hill Street, and while Bishop and her colleagues have been grateful to the church for the ability to continue there, even after their lease ran out, she said it will be a welcome relief to move into their permanent home.

“The biggest thing is, it’s just so bright and warm and welcoming,” she said. At Sacred Hearts, “we’re down in a basement, and it’s hard to even know if we’re down here when we’re operating. A lot of times, clients will say, ‘I thought you were closed.’ It will be great to be so much more visible and welcoming to the clients coming in.”

Getting into the building was a longer process than Bishop initially expected it to be. There was significant objection from a group of residents on Meeting House Lane who were opposed to the arrival of the food pantry on their street, and to the Village Board, which granted the organization a special exception use so it could take over the building.

In March 2022, a group of neighbors filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court, claiming that the village had not followed proper environmental review procedures before granting the special exception use. But their bid to overturn the law was denied by a state justice two months later.

While dealing with various roadblocks and delays, and doing all the work associated with seeking approvals from land-use boards, Bishop and her colleagues with Heart of the Hamptons continued to feed residents from Southampton and beyond, during a time when the increase in need for food assistance shows no signs of abating.

Food pantries around the country saw a spike in demand during the pandemic, but on the East End of Long Island, that trend not only did not reverse once COVID restrictions lifted, but has continued to rise in an alarming way.

Every month since August 2022, Heart of the Hamptons has served more meals than the month prior. In some months, the food demand has increased by 85 percent compared to the previous month.

This year, Heart of the Hamptons has already surpassed the total number of meals distributed in 2020. “That calendar year, we gave out 197,000 meals,” Bishop said. “And just in the first four and a half months of this year, we’ve distributed 198,000 meals.”

While the new location will not represent a big jump in terms of square footage, what it does provide is more office space and meeting room space, which Bishop said can be used at times by other community groups, and will also enable Heart of the Hamptons to offer more programs for its clients, like English language classes, instructional sessions on how to open a bank account, get a driver’s license and more.

The kind of services that will help the food pantry clients improve their situation and give them direct support to become more financially independent. With no end in sight when it comes to the rise in demand for food from clients, those kinds of services are more important than ever.

“That’s so much of what we’ve started to do since COVID,” Bishop said. “We’ve seen that people have so many needs beyond the food, and life is so hard, and people are struggling, and we really want to help people move their lives forward in the most meaningful way.”

Doing that has been, and will need to continue to be, a group effort, Bishop said, and she’s hoping everything that the organization does can be embraced by the entire community.

“It’s going to feel so good getting in the building, and it turned out so beautiful,” she said. “We’ve invested a lot of resources, and had so many people discount or provide their services for free, so it’s really great to see this become a reality.

“I think any anxiety people might have about it, the neighbors, they’ll realize that we’re good neighbors. We pride ourselves on being good neighbors.”