It’s fair to say that running a food pantry, even as a volunteer, is a time-consuming job, making it difficult to plan beyond the immediate tasks at hand. But it’s also evident that a new spirit of collaboration between front-line emergency food providers is percolating. Sharing information, establishing a unified…
Posts published in “Food Pantries”
Food banks have long said that they’re only as good as their pantry networks, and lately, they’ve been backing up that sentiment with intention. Fueled partly by Covid-era support, food banks have been growing the capacity of their pantries through a wide range of grant-making activities. Now, many are at…
Giving food pantry clients the ability to choose their own food can feel like a big undertaking, but Lowcountry Food Bank of Charleston, S.C., has developed a flexible, hands-on approach that’s helping pantries in its network make that move one baby step at a time. About 30% of the 60…
It was a Friday afternoon in late summer when Bryan Wang, the CEO of bosWell Inc., knocked on the door of Better Lives Rhode Island, a Providence-based community organization that supports a food pantry, community meals, and homeless outreach. Wang was cold-calling, trying to find an organization with plenty of…
While giving clients the opportunity to choose their own food is widely considered a food-pantry best practice, taking the step to add more choice can feel overwhelming, especially when current operations seem to be working just fine. McDonald Mission Center, an agency of Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee,…
The site of the Queens Museum in New York City has been many things over the years. It hosted the New York World’s Fair in 1939, and again in 1964. From 1946 to 1950, it was the headquarters of the United Nations. In 1972, the site became home to the…
Letting food pantry clients choose their own food is widely accepted as a dignified way to distribute charitable food. But for pantries that have always packed up bags, moving to that “client choice” model can be an intimidating prospect. The dilemma is aptly summed up in a survey from December…
The Kelly Center for Hunger Relief in El Paso, Tex., had a pretty good feeling a few years ago about the positive impact of its FreshStart program, which is designed to move food pantry clients toward self-sufficiency. Those feelings were confirmed with the results of a recently released formal evaluation…
School backpack programs have been a mainstay of food banking ever since the first one debuted nearly 30 years ago at the Arkansas Rice Depot (now Arkansas Foodbank). The Feeding America network currently supports backpack programs at more than 10,000 schools and institutions, serving more than 54 million meals in…