Loft Community Partnership (LCP) needs your help to acquire everything, including a three-compartment kitchen sink.

LCP is in the early stages of moving from its current home on West Cottage Avenue to new digs at 100 E. Charlotte St. in Millersville, a process it hopes to complete around the beginning of 2026.

The multifaceted nonprofit organization, which serves people in the Penn Manor School District, is already planning kitchen upgrades at the East Charlotte Street building, and a grant has put those plans on the fast track.

LCP recently received a $20,000 grant from the United Way's Level Up and Launch fund. Development chair Joy Olcott noted the Millersville-based group has an opportunity to triple that number over the next several months. Olcott explained that if LCP can raise an additional $20,000 before Friday, Nov. 14, the United Way will match that, which will make it a total of $60,000 going toward the kitchen renovations.

"Our internal goal is to get the $20,000 by Aug. 8, because they have a match payout at that point, as opposed to having to wait until November," Olcott said. Go to http://www.loftcp.org to donate.

Some of the money generated from the matching campaign will be used to purchase equipment such as a stove, a refrigerator, and a three-bowl sink to meet ServSafe specifications.

"(The money) will also allow us to have materials, recipes, and activities for people to take home," said Olcott. "We're going to have classes - cooking classes, preservation classes, and nutrition workshops. We work in tandem with the Central PA Food Bank for like nutrition workshops."

Olcott added that LCP will put together food kits so that clients can take bags of groceries and recipes and prepare healthy meals at home.

LCP will also have a greenhouse and community garden on the grounds of the new building as part of the kitchen project. "We can teach people how to grow some food and then take that food and work it in to a healthy diet," Olcott said. "I think nutrition is a big thing. We're trying to encourage healthy eating because most people are accustomed to getting the shelf-stable stuff like spaghetti and a jar of sauce. Whereas you can work in some fresh vegetables into that to make it even more healthy and to stretch the meals while still on a budget."

In addition to the kitchen project, LCP previously established a $2 million Growing Together capital campaign, $800,000 of which is for the new building. Olcott said the United Way grant enabled the organization to take on the kitchen renovation now, whereas it might have been one of the last things done if the grant had not been awarded.

The community kitchen, food pantry, and clothing bank are all under the umbrella of LCP.

"For many years, it has been that food banks and food pantries exist in basements of churches and give cans out, and nonperishable foods have always been kind of the core of food pantry work," said LCP executive director Jenna Graeff. "Loft Community Kitchen takes our focus on vegetables or Foods to Encourage (F2E). F2E is a portion of what we do at the Loft with Central PA Food Bank, and it takes those foods to encourage and teaches people how to use them in a healthy way. And even if it replaces a couple of their meals a week or even one or two meals with fresh food, it improves overall health outcomes for folks in poverty, which we know there's a strong connection between health and poverty and incomes."

Contributions will allow LCP to continue to positively affect its surrounding areas. "Our impact is really far reaching, even farther than just Penn Manor School District," Graeff said. "We are influencing other hubs and food pantries to be more connection-oriented like us. We provide dignity to our people by giving them the ability to come in and interact with us and choose their foods. And so that's where we're different and unique. So we're kind of really changing the conversation about food pantry work, and that's something that not only impacts the Penn Manor very significantly, but we are impacting other organizations in our line of work."