GUEST OPINION BY KRISTEN WILD, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF OPERATION FOOD SEARCH — The March of Dimes recently gave Missouri a report card of D- for maternal and infant health. You don’t have to be a former schoolteacher like me to find that alarming. Unfortunately, it’s nothing new. In fact,…
Food Bank News
Food banks typically consider the pantries in their network to be their “customers,” which keeps them one step removed from the people who actually go to the pantries. Matt Habash, CEO of Mid-Ohio Food Collective, in contrast, has spent more than a decade trying to get his organization closer to…
In contemplating what food banking might look like in five or so years, the CEOs of our Food Bank CEO Roundtable imagined the ways in which food banks might act more like high-tech, consumer-oriented companies – and the ways in which they might not. Food banks and pantries started out…
There are plenty of opportunities to go around in Food as Medicine, and celebrity chef Michel Nischan aptly summed them up last week at the Food as Medicine Policy Summit held in Washington D.C. Patients get food to improve their lives; doctors get tools to slow devastating disease; insurance plans…
Offering wraparound social services alongside free food has long been viewed as a desirable practice among food banks and pantries. Now, Greater Cleveland Food Bank has raised the bar on how it can be done. Its Community Resource Center, opened earlier this month, provides permanent space to 15 other nonprofit…
Purchased vs. Donated Food — In response to a request for comment by Food Bank News to its Editorial Advisory Board last month, Brian Greene, President and CEO of Houston Food Bank, supplied these thoughts on the topic of purchased versus donated food. His thoughts offer further perspective on this…
Food banks are not the only types of hunger relief agencies to pair free food alongside other social services (see article here). Some food pantries are also adding non-food social services like employment help, medical support and financial literacy to their food offerings. They are housing the combined services in…
There’s no doubt most food banks are spending more money to purchase food these days, though there are a handful outliers that spend virtually nothing on food. During Covid, almost all food banks began purchasing more food when donated goods were tough to come by, and government funding and donated…
Most food banks are aware that the pantries in their networks are not always available in the most convenient places at the most convenient times for clients. One way Mid-Ohio Food Collective is addressing this issue is by opening a set of Amazon-style food lockers at one of its distribution…