When Greater Vancouver Food Bank decided to do away with traditional food drives, it was perfectly clear about why. It proclaimed on social media and its website that up to 30% of the food it received from food drives was spoiled, damaged or unsafe to eat. In addition, it said,…
Food Bank News
When Open Cupboard in Minnesota opened the doors of its new grocery-store style food pantry last year, the team planned to serve no more than 100 shoppers a day. Instead, they were quickly “drinking from the fire hose trying to keep up,” Executive Director Jessica Francis recalled. They opened a…
A new and dignified way to access food is debuting at Texas schools, under a pilot program being run by Houston Food Bank. The food bank is working to install refrigerated food lockers at local schools, where people will be able to pick up food they’ve ordered online through Feeding…
Better together. It’s a phrase the three leaders of the Orange County Hunger Alliance like to use. Not just a description, it’s their operating principle. The Alliance unites Orange County, California’s three leading hunger relief organizations — Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County; Orange County Food Bank, and Abound…
Just about every week, the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School fields questions from organizations that are concerned about their liability related to donated food. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, passed in 1996, was designed to encourage…
More food banks are seeking to expand their missions beyond food distribution to include community engagement – and they have the infrastructure to prove it. The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and Nourishing Hope of Chicago are among the organizations that have recently unveiled space that positions them to more…
After months of making do with far fewer volunteer resources during the pandemic, hunger relief organizations are getting creative as they work to reinvigorate their volunteer ranks. Some are finding value in relying on clients as volunteers. Others are finding ways to engage highly skilled workers for special projects. And…
During the pandemic, the federal Farmers to Families Food Box program loomed large for hunger relief organizations as instrumental in getting food to people who needed it. In the overall scheme of things, however, the program was pretty small potatoes. The USDA last month released its annual Food and Nutrition…
Located in El Paso, TX, El Pasoans Fighting Hunger is the city’s only food bank supporting over 132 partner agencies and 200,000 food-insecure people. Prior to implementing Link2Feed, EPFH was using a paper-based process to fulfill their 3,188 CSFP caseload across a network of partner agencies. The COVID-19 pandemic caused…