Food banking may never be the same again. After more than a year of being in crisis mode, food banks are settling into a new normal — meeting still-elevated need, but doing it more effectively than ever before thanks to 14 months of intense, pandemic-pressurized learning. Among the Covid-inspired innovations…
Posts published in “Covid-19”
Just as grocery stores are making it possible for Americans to do more of their shopping online through apps like Instacart and FreshDirect, so too are food pantries embracing digital choice. While some pantries had begun experimenting with online ordering for clients before Covid-19, others made the switch as a way…
It’s fair to say that food banks loved the fresh produce they received from the Farmers to Families Food Box program, but they did not like the way it was distributed. As that program comes to a close, the new program set to take its place starting in May hits…
As the biggest news story of 2020, Covid-19 played a role in the conversation at Food Bank News’ CEO roundtable discussion, held online in early November. But more prominent were perennial questions about ways in which the problem of hunger should be framed and solved. There were unexpectedly positive outcomes…
Feeding South Florida didn’t need a strategic analysis to know it lacked the storage space to handle the enormous volume of food coming into its warehouse this spring to meet demand generated by the pandemic. “You could see that an incoming pallet was blocking an aisle, but there was nowhere…
As a relatively new organization — only ten years old — Feeding Children Everywhere has the benefit of not being tied to legacy notions of how things are done. So its embrace of a virtual food bank model in response to Covid-19 has been seamless. Under its virtual model, the…
Underground food distributions, direct financial assistance, and postings on WhatsApp are some of the ways food banks are reaching out to undocumented clients, a population that has been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus crisis. The efforts are designed to combat the chilling effects of the current administration’s immigration policies,…
When the Stamp Out Hunger food drive, usually held the second Saturday in May, was postponed because of Covid-19, it was the largest food drive in the country to be suspended, but far from the only. The shuttering of the Stamp Out Hunger drive, organized annually by the National Association…
When demand for charitable food ratcheted up in the early stages of the pandemic, San Diego Food Bank responded like many of its peers — with mass distributions aimed at getting food to hundreds or even thousands of people at a time. But the results of those efforts did not…