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…
Food Bank News
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…
Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma was known years ago for having the first production kitchen in the Feeding America network. “We had the first, but we were way behind in what we were doing with it,” noted Jeff Marlow, Chief Executive Officer. That’s no longer the case, with a recent…
Vinnie Oakes used to order produce by the case. Now he buys it by the truckload. That is just one of the differences Oakes encountered when he moved from a long career in restaurant and casino hospitality to Reno-based Food Bank of Northern Nevada, where he has served as Director…