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…
Posts published in “Strategy”
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…
Ever since it merged with a restaurant serving free community meals a year and a half ago, Feeding Tampa Bay envisioned that meal preparation would be a bigger part of its future. Suddenly, that future is here. In response to the pandemic, the food bank is now coordinating the production…
A quick look at the home page of Yolo Food Bank’s website underscores a main mission of its Covid-19 response: to get food to the elderly and vulnerable who are stuck at home. In stepping up to meet the needs of low-income quarantined individuals, Yolo is taking on one of…
With about one-third of the food pantries across Toronto having closed, Daily Bread Food Bank has begun distributing food from public libraries, taking advantage of their book-processing center, trucks and temporarily out-of-work librarians. Four libraries have begun distributing food and a total of nine are expected to, thanks to partnerships…
After 15 years at the aid organization CARE, where he confronted conflict, earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters, Thomas Reynolds, the CEO of Northwest Harvest in Seattle, understood the “absolute” importance of being prepared for the Covid-19 virus. So early on, he did what you do in these situations and devised…
Jon Stepanian had some great ideas about how to impose social distancing at the five large weekly food distributions he oversees throughout Long Island and Brooklyn, including having clients show up within certain time periods, depending on their age. Those good intentions, however, have not necessarily translated into streamlined distributions…
To protect the health of its senior volunteers during the Covid-19 crisis, Three Square Food Bank has instituted a top-to-bottom reorg of its network of about 160 pantries and agencies. In the space of about six hours on Monday, March 16, the Las Vegas-based food bank devised a plan that…
Michael Guerra of San Antonio Food Bank was sitting in a meeting about the food bank’s coronavirus contingency plan when he thought back to a chance encounter he’d had that morning: a food-insecure client of the food bank was lamenting the inability to acquire reserve food, when it was already…