North Attleborough, local YMCA partner to address food insecurity

MMA Innovation Award winner, From The Beacon, February 2026

As communities see food insecurity on the rise among their residents, a partnership between North Attleborough and the Hockomock Area YMCA will provide free groceries to families in need throughout the region.

Over the past few years, North Attleborough has worked with the YMCA to create a regional food security distribution center, which is expected to open later this year in a building recently acquired by the town. The center will replace a smaller food pantry that had operated out of Town Hall for years, and will serve households well beyond North Attleborough.

Town Manager Michael Borg said the partnership combines the town’s resources with the YMCA’s operational expertise and network to give people more sustainable, and more dignified, access to food. The new center will share building space with several health and human services departments, creating a one-stop center for some of the town’s more vulnerable residents.

Borg, who also serves on the YMCA’s Board of Incorporators, saw a partnership with the YMCA as a vehicle to create a regional model for addressing food insecurity.

“When there’s an opportunity for us to work regionally, we do it even better, right?” Borg said. “So I think that’s what kind of drove us to it. That’s why regionalization was so important. The need was out there. We partnered with a great organization that already had a regional impact, and are just making it all work for our residents, and the residents around us as well.”

Borg said the town and the YMCA started getting more requests for food assistance during the pandemic, and the need has persisted in the years since.

Lenore’s Pantry had operated out of Town Hall for the past several decades, having started with a closet that the town’s longtime public health nurse, Lenore Paquin, kept stocked with nonperishable foods, often items from her own home. Paquin died in 2019, but her daughter Leslie is involved in the plans for the regional center, which will bear Paquin’s name.

To accommodate a new regional center, North Attleborough bought a former academic building from Fisher College about a year ago. The town used $5.2 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the purchase and renovations.

Borg said the new center, which takes up roughly 2,600 square feet in a much larger building, has been designed with a grocery store layout, intended to provide an improved experience over the old food-pantry model, where people are handed a bag of groceries, whether or not they actually liked or could eat the food inside. The new center will allow people to select foods with dignity, he said.

“They can walk through like anybody else at a different place and get the items they need,” Borg said. “So that, to me, was the big, huge success here.”

While the town will manage the building and the property, the YMCA will oversee the food pantry operations, including client intake, scheduling, volunteer coordination, food sourcing, and managing partnerships with other organizations to strengthen the impact, according to Jim Downs, CEO of the Hockomock Area YMCA.

“Partnering with the town of North Attleborough allows us to align municipal leadership, community needs and health priorities — and our Y’s focus on community-based support — in a way that no single organization could do alone,” Downs said. “The town brings deep local knowledge, trust, and infrastructure, while the YMCA brings experience operating food access programs at scale, regional partnerships, and social supports for families.”

The project will allow the town to place the food pantry in one location with the Senior Center and the veterans and health departments, enabling the town to address the needs of seniors, veterans and other vulnerable residents more holistically, and in a more coordinated manner, Borg said. The town and the YMCA also worked with the local transit authority to extend bus routes to serve the new facility.

For more information, contact Assistant Town Manager Antonio Morabito at [email protected].