Helping Hands Ministry is hoping two donations will help the food pantry serve more people.

Over the last two weeks, Wilsonart International of Temple and McLane Company, Inc. of Temple donated shelving and a forklift, respectively, for the pantry's warehouse.

"One of the things it is really helping us with, right now, is just getting this place organized much better," Helping Hands Executive Director Mike Bergman said. "We had stuff all over the place and this way we are able to take things and set them up and out of the way."

During the United Way's "Day of Caring," several Wilsonart employees came to help clean up the warehouse and noticed that they could help in another way.

"We had about 15 people that came down here to work and five or six of them were from Wilsonart," Bergman said. "They were here to clean this room and in the process, I just mentioned to one of them that in the future we wanted to put some racks in. They said they had a lot of that type of material laying out back of the building that would just rust away if they didn't use it."

Two weeks later, the Wilsonart employees were back at the pantry installing the new shelving.

"This is going to increase our capacity as well for the future," Bergman said. "I've got some things that I want to do that will enable us to better serve some of the people in our area."

After the "Day of Caring" event, Bergman was in a meeting with McLane about another event when he asked about a forklift.

"I was involved in a meeting where it was suggested that I might talk to McLane's about helping us with the 'CAN-struction' event that we have coming up in February," Bergman said. "I called them and asked about the event, but I also asked them if they had ever had a forklift that still has some use in it, but they weren't using."

McLane representatives then came out to see what type of forklift the pantry might need and about a week before the shelving arrived, the forklift was delivered.

"It turned out to be a good timing thing because when the Wilsonart people came, they needed a forklift to unload all the stuff and we had one," Bergman said.

Because of the donations, Bergman said Helping Hands can help more people in areas such as Moffat and Bartlett.

"Part of my anticipations for the future has been that we would broaden our service area," Bergman said. "If we have the capacity for storing the food, Capillary Food Bank has told us that they would let us order more if we were serving a broader area, and now we have a place where we can have that stored."