NEED FOOD?
Are you operating a small food bank in a rural area or small town? Do you struggle to find donations because your service area has very infrastructure in place? Do you feel stuck because your food bank is located in an area where access to food resources including grocery stores is limited and it feels like clients out number donors 100 to 1?
ROOF Community Services, located in Rochester, grapples with these issues every day. Rochester is an unincorporated area of Thurston County about 30 miles south of Olympia. There is no public transportation, no large corporations or companies, no city government and very few social services offered in the area. This one-stoplight town has a population of 11,000 and over 50% of the children qualify for free or reduced price lunches at school.
Because of our limited resources, the staff at ROOF Community Services have become very good at forming partnerships and soliciting donations. Hopefully one of these ideas will work in your community to benefit your food bank and its clients.
During the summer months, communities often have some sort of community celebration. These festivals might include a parade, carnival, pancake or spaghetti feed and a place for people to congregate. Use this opportunity to advertise you food bank. Set up booth along the parade route or better yet enter the parade and push empty grocery carts down the street while advertising your hours of operation and what foods are most needed at the food bank. Make it easy for the community to find you by passing out flyers with your address or donation drop box sites and give them a list of commonly needed items such as soups, peanut butter, and tuna. If parade applications are mailed out in advance to participants, ask the organizers of they would be willing to sponsor a food drive at the parade check-in table and include a food drive flyer with each application. Have collection bins available that day for parade participants to donate canned goods.
Throughout the summer, fresh veggies are plentiful so work with local growers, backyard gardeners and farmer’s markets to inform them that food banks need their surplus. Before growers start planting, ask them to plant an extra row specifically for the food bank. Maple Lane School, a local juvenile detention center in Rochester, planted a garden with the intent of growing food for the needy and teaching the boys skills they could use for the rest of their lives. The inmates, who were eager to spend time outside learned about gardening and giving back to the community. The half-acre garden produced over 37,000 pounds of fresh organic produce for the ROOF Food Bank.
Joining the local Chamber or attending community meetings such as Rotary or Lions Clubs can benefit your food bank as well. Be active in school events too. For example, Parent-Teacher organizations might offer to organize a food drive at a dance or in the school. School community information nights are a great way to advertise your needs as well. Ask school officials to speak to civic or extra curricular clubs about hosting food drives and make them class competitions. In the fall, have a “Food Bowl” football game against the rival high school where each school collects food during the football season. This would benefit two food banks in small communities. Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and 4-H clubs and churches love doing projects that benefit their communities too.
Don’t wait for the holidays to remind folks that there are hungry people in your community. Make it a part of what you do everyday. Staff and volunteers are great advocates for the need they see on a daily basis. Once the word gets out about the needs of your food bank, you will be amazed by the support your will receive.
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