Although Good Shepherd Food Bank has long served diverse communities across Maine, it wasn’t until Covid-19 hit that the organization realized how much variety there was in the food its clients wanted – and how little of that variety it provided. The problem became apparent when fears about how the…
Posts published in “Root Causes”
A foundation based in Paraguay is seeking to work with food banks across the globe to help it spread its groundbreaking method of moving families out of poverty. The Poverty Stoplight seeks to empower individual families to better understand the exact nature of their poverty and the specific steps they…
Two years ago, Maine introduced legislation that endeavored to do something that has never happened in the U.S. — formally recognize the human right to food. The bill proposed a ballot measure for voters to decide whether the state constitution should establish a right to food and “freedom from hunger.”…
Capital Area Food Bank is far from the only food bank to have faced disruptions during the pandemic as its pantries and other partner agencies struggled to stay open. But it may be one of the few taking a highly analytical approach to restructuring its pantry network, post-pandemic. [This article…
A food bank in Missouri has shown in a pilot that it can improve health outcomes by giving people nutritious food. Now it wants to conduct a more formal test that would prove it to insurers. Operation Food Search of St. Louis is about to embark on a three-year randomized,…
Food banks that run or support farms with a cultural mission are reaping more than just crops. At food-bank farms, cultural awareness can take on many forms: The farms may be focused on supporting Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), or helping to create a sense of community among…
At Oregon Food Bank, the path toward greater equity is starting from within. The food bank is one of the few and perhaps the only to have created a senior leadership position dedicated to addressing equity. The person who fills that role, Rut Martinez-Alicea, Director of Equity, People & Culture,…
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 Food Bank of Western Massachusetts took a hard look at food distribution across its four-county network a few years ago, one thing became strikingly clear: access to emergency food was not equitable, and the reason was race. The county with the largest concentration of food insecurity, poverty and…