A former daycare building sitting on the Milwaukee-Wauwatosa border is about to get a new life as a community resource center and affordable grocery store. Ebenezer Stone Ministries says it is revamping the former Pilgrim Lutheran Church daycare building at 70th and Center, with plans to open an affordable grocery store in the basement alongside services covering everything from mental health to veteran support.
The building spent 26 years as the Pilgrim Lutheran Church daycare center before Ebenezer Stone Ministries took it over, according to FOX6 News Milwaukee. Hayden Penkert, president of the ministry's board of directors, said the project is still in its early stages. “We are in the early planning stages. We're getting it cleaned out,” Penkert said, noting the building is still full of decades of daycare items left behind.
Board member Kelly Eger said affordable groceries and other resources could help families in the surrounding area, according to the same report. The planned center is expected to offer mental health prevention resources, health insurance assistance, veteran support and Milwaukee police resources, in addition to the grocery store, which will sit in the basement and be run mostly by volunteers.
A Food Desert Location With Transit Access
Organizers see the site's practical features as part of the pitch: the new location is on a bus line and has a parking lot, which the ministry says will help it fill a gap in a food desert. Ebenezer Stone Ministries expects operations to start around spring.
The ministry already runs pantry and resource programs at its Milwaukee location on South 35th Street, where neighbors can receive pantry help every other week, per the organization's own program listings. That existing pantry connects people to resources for mental health, addiction, housing and some legal needs, and representatives from BlueCross, Humana, BadgerCare and Food Share assist visitors there as volunteer nurses provide health screenings. The group's warehouse, which had shifted its redistribution operation to 45th and Burnham in late January, reopened in April.
A City Grappling With Shrinking Grocery Access
The 70th and Center project lands amid a broader reckoning over Milwaukee's shrinking grocery footprint. Since 2021, nine grocery stores have closed across the city, five of them on the north side, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. From 2021 to 2023 alone, the city lost four major grocery retailers, all located north of I-94, the paper reported, and a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study found predominantly White areas have more than three times the number of supermarkets as predominantly Black areas and more than twice as many as predominantly Hispanic areas.
Milwaukee has responded by recognizing food apartheid as a public health emergency, forming an interdepartmental task force and passing an ordinance requiring 60 days' notice before a grocery store can close, per the same Journal Sentinel report. One in five Milwaukee residents lives in an area considered a food desert, a Medical College of Wisconsin public health expert told TMJ4, a figure that has grown since the Near West Side Food Access Project counted 13 food deserts in Milwaukee County back in 2015. TMJ4 also noted that rising transit costs, including a 2026 fare hike from $2 to $2.75 for a single Milwaukee County Transit System ride, can compound the difficulty of reaching a grocery store.
Community-Led Projects Popping Up Citywide
Ebenezer Stone Ministries is not alone in trying to patch these gaps with grassroots solutions. In the city's Metcalfe Park neighborhood, where Pick 'n Save's departure created a new food desert in July 2025, a separate effort called Kingdom Kitchen & Grocery is in the works — a proposed community-owned grocery store and wellness center from founder Tarah Lee, reported by the Journal Sentinel. That group is eyeing the former Pick 'n Save site on North 35th Street and envisions a structure giving the community and employees ownership in the business, with preliminary plans including a pharmacy, cafe, teaching kitchen, lifestyle medicine clinic and urban farm. Lee has said the project could become a reality by early 2028 if it proceeds as planned.
Other community efforts have already taken root. Sherman Park Grocery opened in 2022 in a designated food desert and later added a cooler through partnerships with the Medical College of Wisconsin and Feeding America, per TMJ4. And in June, Greater Good(s) MKE launched a pay-what-you-can fresh produce market inside the lobby of Concordia 27 on North 27th Street, part of a $2 million investment by Milwaukee County and city partners in that site, according to the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. The city has also backed these efforts financially — Ebenezer Stone Ministry previously received a $25,000 Fresh Food Access Fund grant for refrigeration equipment to store meat and dairy, part of a $100,000 pool the city awarded to support healthy-food initiatives in underserved areas, according to Urban Milwaukee.
