While giving clients the opportunity to choose their own food is widely considered a food-pantry best practice, taking the step to add more choice can feel overwhelming, especially when current operations seem to be working just fine. McDonald Mission Center, an agency of Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee,…
Food Bank News
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 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…
Like many food pantries, Daily Bread Food Pantry in Danbury, Conn. was recently given the opportunity to apply for a grant to increase its ability to distribute food. With Connecticut Foodshare making sizable grants available, Peter Kent, Executive Director of Daily Bread, figured that plenty of pantries across the state…
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…
Of the ten recommendations that the Bipartisan Policy Center recently issued for advancing Food is Medicine, only one addresses the role of community based organizations (CBOs) that provide food and nutrition (i.e., food banks and pantries). The Food is Medicine movement is gaining prominence as a way to address spiraling…