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,…
Posts published in “Food Pantries”
Like many food pantries, Daily Bread Food Pantry in Danbury, Conn. was recently given the opportunity to apply for a grant to increase its ability to distribute food. With Connecticut Foodshare making sizable grants available, Peter Kent, Executive Director of Daily Bread, figured that plenty of pantries across the state…
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…
As more people recognize that food is integral to health, more hospital-based food pantries are turning up. In Chicago, one hospital has pioneered an “open-access” pantry model that it contends can be more beneficial to public health than other approaches. The Feed1st pantry at the University of Chicago Medical Center…
When Gary Oppenheimer, Founder and Executive Director of AmpleHarvest.org, set out to expand food access in Native American reservations, he ended up focusing on a few small details that made all the difference. Oppenheimer had built up a large database of more than 8,000 food pantries across the country, as…
Early on in the pandemic, NYC-based Met Council, the nation’s largest kosher food pantry network, was invited to a meeting at the mayor’s office where government officials ran down a list of more than 800 food pantries to make sure each had access to the city’s emergency food system. When…