Some of the nation’s largest food banks are setting new standards for the food pantries of the future. Food banks among the top 20 on Food Bank News’ list of the largest 100 have recently designed and introduced food distribution outlets that differ sharply from traditional pantries. Like other emerging…
Posts published in “Strategy”
The most crucial ingredient in Our Neighbors Table’s plan to bring food security to its region by 2029 is not food — it’s community involvement via an advisory group of local organizations. Its Food Security Advisory Group, which includes local town officials, health care providers, schools and councils on aging,…
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…
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,…
Julie Yurko, the President and CEO of Northern Illinois Food Bank, was on vacation reading a book called “Delivering Happiness” about the online shoe seller Zappos when it occurred to her that the concept of online ordering with a focus on customer service did not exist in the charitable food…
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 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…
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…
Second Harvest Heartland of Minnesota and others are proving that a food bank does not necessarily need a kitchen to play a major role in distributing thousands of freshly prepared meals. Using Feeding America’s MealConnect platform, Second Harvest Heartland is sourcing large donations of bulk food and guiding it toward…