For food bank advocates seeking to sway their state legislatures toward policies that promote health and nutrition, Dariush Mozaffarian has some guidance about where to push. States can take advantage of three big federal tools, each with a lot of funding behind them, to promote a healthier populace, said Mozaffarian,…
Food Bank News
It’s fair to say that the biggest expenditure in a food bank’s budget is food, especially now, as ongoing demand continues to outstrip the amount of food coming in via donations and federal aid. But there are plenty of other things that food banks spend money on to keep their…
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…
Affinity marketing is the reason some people carry credit cards emblazoned with logos from a university or sports team. It taps into a person’s sense of identity, giving them an extra nudge toward a particular product. Raj and Anna Asava have applied the concept of affinity to a more charitable…
To Erin Pulling, becoming CEO of Food Bank of the Rockies was a bit of a leap – she had never run such a large organization before and she didn’t know anything about food banking. At the same time, she couldn’t deny the feeling that she had landed in a…
Most food banks do a good job of tracking and talking about how many pounds of food they deliver. But they still have a ways to go in terms of knowing and sharing how much of that food is nutritious. Partnership for a Healthier America wants to change that by…
Early insights from Massachusetts show promising pathways for using Medicaid dollars to treat food and nutrition insecurity, but underscore that technology will be a big challenge. Hunger relief entities in Massachusetts got extra incentive to continue exploring ways to work with the healthcare community in September, when the state’s MassHealth…
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…
The ability of food banks to keep up with the ongoing demand for food is easily one of their biggest accomplishments of recent years. After the frenzy of the pandemic settled, millions more people than before the pandemic continued to access charitable food. And rising inflation has kept demand uncomfortably…