Human Services
What we learned testing whole-person care in a working food pantry
12 min
average session
39
care plans generated across 25 clients
7
staff trained in under an hour each
The Challenge
Thurston County Food Bank serves hundreds of walk-ins daily across two locations. Client advocates had neither the time nor the tools to act as full case managers — and clients came primarily for food, not lengthy intake. The team wanted to know: could a busy, high-traffic pantry become a doorway to housing, financial, and health resources without disrupting the core mission of feeding people?
The Solution
Working closely with the TCFB team, Elora tested several deployment models in a live pantry environment. The clear winner was a staffed resource station — an advocate-led setup that worked within the natural flow of a visit, rather than mobile capture on a busy floor. Clients flagged with additional needs were connected for a focused one-on-one session, with financial, housing, goods, and care resources the most-used categories. The pilot also surfaced honest lessons about deploying AI in community settings: the value of human-led consent, the need to design for multilingual encounters, and the reality that a noisy, fast-moving pantry calls for a different model than a quiet field visit. Those lessons are now shaping how Elora is built.
"The Elora team's responsiveness throughout the pilot was genuinely collaborative — feedback was addressed quickly and specifically.
— Rosie K., Client Services Lead, Thurston County Food Bank
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