When Mid-Ohio Food Collective opens its Eastland Prosperity Center in the fall, it will be a fitting capstone to the career of Matt Habash, who recently announced his retirement from the food bank after 42 years. More than four decades ago, Habash decided to forego law school to instead work…
Food Bank News
At the Food Club Network in Michigan, patrons are not “clients” or “neighbors,” but “members,” highlighting a novel way of doing hunger relief that is about to expand. Seeking to create an experience that resembles typical grocery shopping, the Food Club Network has pioneered well-stocked, healthy-food pantries that offer 30-day…
Food banking may be fueled by tangible, non-artificial things – like food and relationships. But it turns out that there is also plenty of room for artificial intelligence to play a role in the fundamental act of feeding people. As with any organization, the functions of a food bank include…
GUEST POST FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant promise for the charitable food system. It is arriving now — in donor segmentation tools, demand forecasting pilots, automated grant drafting, and logistics optimization experiments across food banks of every size. But what does the next three…
San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is proving that people with lived experience of hunger have a multitude of expertise to lend to food banks. Like a growing number of food banks, it already taps its participants to tell their personal stories to legislators to advocate for policy change. Soon it will…
This month, Claire Babineaux-Fontenot will transition out of her role as CEO of Feeding America, seven and a half years after taking the helm. She has had a tremendous impact on the network, perhaps most notably by giving people with lived experience of hunger greater say in how the food…
GUEST POST BY STACEY CRNICH OF GOODROOTS NORTHWEST – When GoodRoots Northwest, formerly the Bonney Lake Food Bank, quietly closed the doors of its client-choice pantry, it wasn’t a sign of failure. It was a declaration of strategy and a replicable model for success. Our Pierce County, Wash.-based organization made…
As new work requirements for SNAP lurch into effect across the country, food banks and pantries are doing what they can to ease the blow. The timing of the new rules varies by state, but the upshot is that millions more Americans who previously qualified for SNAP will have to…
A framework for hunger relief pioneered in Canada is slowly making its way into the United States. Gather, a Portsmouth, N.H.-based nonprofit founded in 1816 to support the families of fishermen, has become only the second organization in the U.S. to adopt Canada’s Community Food Center model, which uses a…