Houston Food Bank is intent on getting out the vote. In what appears to be a first, the nation’s third-largest food bank is building a network of “civic hubs,” aimed at educating people about the power they have to direct government activities via their right to vote. The initiative advances…
Food Bank News
Our CEO Roundtable this year took place literally hours after the government shutdown that suspended SNAP payments to millions of Americans had ended. But relief was not one of the emotions expressed by the 12 food bank leaders on the call. Every November, members of our Editorial Advisory Board gather…
Mountaineer Food Bank of West Virginia is cracking the code on how to serve food-insecure children – one of the most difficult populations for food banks to reach. Its Extra Mile home delivery program works in deep partnership with area school districts to get boxes of food right onto the…
A Food is Medicine program at Albany, NY-based Regional Food Bank is succeeding in helping diabetes patients measurably improve their health. The food bank’s 12-week Food Farmacy program provides patient households with weekly boxes of healthy food, along with weekly virtual nutrition counseling sessions. Results show patients significantly improving their…
A visit to San Diego’s Comic Con museum has given rise to a social enterprise business at Feeding San Diego that uses superhero tales to inspire school kids to get involved in fighting hunger. Feeding San Diego’s comic book and classroom curriculum, Hunger Action Heroes Unite!, is designed to educate…
A hurricane wrapped in a pandemic is a fair way to describe the daunting challenge facing food banks as they confront the unfolding disaster of unfunded SNAP benefits. As with hurricanes and Covid, the SNAP disaster loomed in the distance before it became reality, with the possibility that it could…
As federal funding for food assistance becomes increasingly erratic, food banks are turning to food streams they can more readily control. High on the strategic to-do list for many food banks is to get more food from local grocers, making our recent webinar on “Food Sourcing in a Time of…
A report that Amazon put out earlier this year identified various ways to make charitable meal delivery programs programs more sustainable. One suggestion, gleaned from focus groups of food bankers, was to have third-party meal-delivery providers (like Amazon and DoorDash) provide longer-term agreements to their partner charitable organizations. Amazon delivered…
The five major food banks of New Jersey recently achieved a major goal in their aim to build up more resilient local food systems in their state. The food banks are now sourcing upwards of 50% of the produce they distribute from local farms, an increase from about 35% previously.…