One of Oahu’s largest food pantries, which distributes more than 3 million pounds of free food to more than 53,000 households, will shutter its doors in Kakaako after Thanksgiving unless it can find a new home.

“We need an angel landlord of some type,” said Gill Berger, who serves on the board of directors of Feeding Hawaii Together. “We can’t afford market-rate rent. We’re hoping for something close to a freebie.”

Feeding Hawaii Together has been helping homeless and low-income families — some from as far away as Waianae — for the last 18 years in Kakaako, including the last 15 years in its current, 19,000-square-foot location on Keawe Street.

“The community cannot afford to not have these people servicing everyone,” said Gerald Shintaku, president and CEO of the Hawaii Foodbank, which supplies Feeding Hawaii Together with the proteins, canned goods and fresh produce it distributes. “It’s huge.”

But Feeding Hawaii Together’s new landlord wants the organization out by the end of the year after it distributes its last free shopping cart of food Dec. 1.

Now the nonprofit group is scrambling to find less than half of its current space — or 10,000 square feet — somewhere from Mapunapuna to Moiliili.

It won’t be easy.

This year the amount of available industrial space on Oahu fell to an all-time low of 1.3 percent at the end of June, representing the fifth consecutive year that available inventory has dropped.

Even if a big enough space were readily available, Feeding Hawaii Together can afford to pay only nominal rent, at best, Berger said.

So the challenge is to find a generous warehouse landlord who’ll be willing to take in an organization that has provided a lifeline to families such as Pua and Pai‘ea Kamahoahoa and their two boys, ages 15 and 9, for the last six years.

Unlike other food pantries, the Kamahoahoas can find fresh fruits and vegetables at Feeding Hawaii Together, where clients use shopping carts to pick out whatever they want instead of receiving a prepacked bag of food filled with items they might not need, let alone want.

Pua Kamahoahoa, 32, works part time for the state Department of Education teaching Hawaiian studies. Pai‘ea Kamahoahoa, 40, has a full-time job driving TheBus for Oahu Transit Services.

Together they make $65,000 a year, which is enough to afford their one-bedroom apartment in Waikiki but not enough to feed themselves and their two growing boys.

“After rent and bills and loans, we don’t have much,” Pai‘ea Kamahoahoa said.

The family represents “the middle man,” Pua Kamahoahoa said. “We’re literally just above the poverty line.”

Even though she works for the DOE, Pua said her boys cannot qualify for reduced lunch at school.

“We literally make just a few hundreds of dollars too much even to qualify for reduced lunch,” Pua said.

The Kamahoahoas like “the sense of dignity” they feel while picking out food at Feeding Hawaii Together, where the boys especially like the cookies.

“They take you shopping like it’s a store, and there’s no limit,” Pua said.

Feeding Hawaii Together also outfitted the Kamahoahoas’ apartment “literally from the dressers to the forks and spoons,” she said.

On Thanksgiving the family received a 20-pound turkey from Feeding Hawaii Together.

“When you’re hit with life’s struggles,” Pua said, “where do you go? You go to the pantry.”

Without the financial pressure of having to buy food for their boys, the Kamahoahoas sporadically treat their family to something as simple as an occasional ice cream outing.

Giving clients a sense of dignity is important to Feeding Hawaii Together’s mission, Berger said.

Nine percent to 10 percent of the group’s clients are homeless. The other 90 percent are simply “desperate for food,” said Charlie Lorenz, the group’s executive director, who founded Feeding Hawaii Together with his wife, Diana.

Two years ago Feeding Hawaii Together had to shut down temporarily for termites, and some clients who returned said they had to resort to eating dog food and cat food, Charlie Lorenz said.

“They’re not homeless,” he said. “They live in so-called ‘affordable housing.’”

Feeding Hawaii Together’s clients represent a cross section of island society: The majority are “working poor,” and 50 percent of them are senior citizens.

On a typical day 300 to 400 clients line up along Keawe Street waiting to get in, including 10 to 25 newbies each day, Charlie Lorenz said.

With Hawaii already struggling to reduce the country’s highest per-capita rate of homelessness, Berger said Feeding Hawaii Together “prevents homelessness.”

Gary Kirby, 71, is among the thousands of Oahu residents who rely on Feeding Hawaii Together every week.

He works part time to pay his $530 monthly share of his Hawaii Public Housing Authority studio apartment in Nuuanu. After rent, Kirby has little left over to feed himself.

Instead, he can rely on getting free fresh eggs, chicken, fish and produce at Feeding Hawaii Together.

“I have to budget everything,” he said just before loading his box of food onto a pull cart to take home.

If Feeding Hawaii Together disappears, Kirby said, it would leave “a big puka in the community.”