Meet Our Members: Community Services of Moses Lake

Community Services of Moses Lake and the Moses Lake Food Bank

By Stephanie Kardos, Harvest Capacity Developer

One of the highlights of a recent WFC staff trip to Eastern Washington was visiting the Moses Lake Food bank.  Peny Archer is the Operations Manager there. She has been with the ML Food Bank since 2010. Peny’s passion was abundant as she showed us around the food bank, distribution center and a newly donated 6 acre parcel of land. 

The land, donated by one of their long term volunteers, is the groundwork for some very exciting long term objectives that they have in Moses Lake. It will host a new location for the food bank, distribution center and eventually a garden / small farm complete with hydroponics.  

Community Services of Moses Lake serves 5 counties: Grant, Adams, Lincoln, Benton and Yakima, a total of 34 food banks.  Collectively this network of food banks feed 11,000 families a month with often 1,000 families just at their ML Food Bank alone.

Also on the tour with us was one of my fellow VISTA Jeni Roberts who participates in the same program as me called Harvest Against Hunger. HAH was developed by Rotary First Harvest.  There are 10 VISTA’s with HAH all around the West Coast who help to develop gleaning and produce recovery programs that support their local hunger relief groups. 

Jeni is starting her second year at Moses Lake and has a great group of volunteers that will be gleaning nearby farms this growing season for fresh produces to share with all the food banks they serve. Last year when HAH was introduced they almost tripled the amount of fresh produce they distributed, and often organizing gleans of 10+ tons of food at one time.   

The positive energy in the food bank was palpable; Peny and her staff are doing exciting things in Moses Lake. Forward thinking ideas and exciting projects.  They even have fun in the office too, sometimes even playfully shooting each other with Nerf Guns.  Community Services of Moses Lake is a great asset for Central Washington.

To learn more visit their website www.mlfood.org