The Greater Boston Food Bank
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The Greater Boston Food Bank is a nearly $50 million-a-year charitable business, distributing more than 25 million pounds of food annually to a network of 600 community hunger-relief agencies in a dedicated partnership to feed the hungry in eastern Massachusetts.
Founded in 1981, The Food Bank now serves 190 communities in the nine counties of eastern Massachusetts: Barnstable, Bristol, Duke, Essex, Middlesex, Nantucket, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk. The Food Bank’s network of community agencies includes food pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, transitional shelters, long-term residences, rehabilitation centers, treatment centers, after-school programs, youth centers, and senior centers.
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[edit] Who The Food Bank Serves
The Greater Boston Food Bank provides hunger-relief to an estimated 321,500 people annually, according to “Hunger in Eastern Massachusetts 2006,” The Food Bank’s quadrennial study on the issue. This represents a 14% increase since the 2001 Eastern Massachusetts hunger study and almost double the number since 1997. About 83,000 people are served each week.
“Hunger in Eastern Massachusetts 2006” reveals clients seeking emergency food assistance from The Greater Boston Food Bank’s member agencies are typically part of hard-working families living below the federal poverty line. A third of all households served by The Food Bank have at least one adult working in their household, and 64% of the households live below the federal poverty line. More than a third (109,000) of the members of the households are children under the age of 18, and about 10% of clients at program sites served by The Food Bank are age 65 and older.
As a response to past hunger studies, The Food Bank has developed direct service programs targeted to underserved populations.
[edit] The Food Bank’s Direct Service Programs
• Kids Cafe is The Greater Boston Food Bank’s after-school and summer meal program, offered in partnership with six local Boys & Girls Clubs. The Food Bank provides an average of 4,400 nutritious meals five days a week to more than 1,000 disadvantage children in safe, accessible locations. The program also includes nutrition education classes. Kids Cafes are located at the Gerald and Darlene Jordan Club in Chelsea; the West End Boys & Girls Club in Allston/Brighton; the Colonel Daniel Marr Boys & Girls Club in Dorchester; the George Robert White Youth Development Center/Blue Hill Club in Dorchester; the Yawkey Club of Roxbury; and the Thomas Chew Memorial Boys & Girls Club in Fall River.
• The Brown Bag Program provides families and seniors with 15-pound, supplemental bags of nutritious groceries once a month. Serving 5,000 people in need, volunteers assemble and distribute the bags at community and senior centers at 10 locations: Allston/Brighton, Brockton, Cambridge/Somerville, Charlestown, Chelsea, Fall River, Haverhill, Lynn, Mattapan, and Taunton.
• Second Helping provides more than 350,000 meals a year to approximately 35 member agencies by quickly collecting and distributing donations of perishable food from retailers, caterers, hotels, academic institutions, corporate cafeterias, and other food service establishments.
• The Perishables Program is an innovative supplemental foods program that delivers perishable foods, such as fresh produce and dairy products, to 34 Boston Housing Authority (BHA) developments to help augment the diets of about 3,100 low-income residents.
[edit] Nutrition Initiatives
The Greater Boston Food Bank’s Nutrition Department develops nutritional guidelines and works with the Food Acquisition Group to obtain nutrient-rich food donations. Today, a quarter of the food The Food Bank distributes is fresh, including 3.3 million pounds of produce and additional millions of pounds in dairy and protein. The Nutrition Department staff also train member agency staff and volunteers in safe food handling and preparation through ServSafe® courses, pantry food safety workshops and residential food safety workshops. They also conduct nutrition classes in conjunction with The Food Bank’s Kids Cafe program. And they have created ClicknCooksm, an online database that offers simple-to-prepare recipes using Food Bank distributed ingredients.
[edit] Where The Food Bank Gets its Food
The Greater Boston Food Bank acquires donated food from local retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, food service establishments, food drives, and growers, as well as from national food donors as a member of America’s Second Harvest – The Nation’s Food Bank Network. The Food Bank also receives donated food from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and purchases food with funds from the Massachusetts Emergency Food Assistance Program. In 2006, The Food Bank distributed more than 25 million pounds of donated and purchased food—enough to provide approximately 19.5 million meals.
[edit] Volunteers
The Greater Boston Food Bank runs the largest internal volunteer program in the area. The majority of volunteers work in the Food Bank’s 50,000-square-foot warehouse, sorting and repacking donated products that are distributed to more than 600 hunger-relief agencies. Nearly 14,500 volunteers contributed almost 50,000 hours, sorted four million pounds of donated product, and saved The Food Bank more than $600,000 in labor costs in FY2006.
[edit] Financial Support
The Greater Boston Food Bank raised approximately $4,400,000 for annual support from nearly 23,000 individual and corporate financial donors in FY2006. Eighty-nine cents of every dollar The Food Bank receives goes directly to hunger-relief efforts, and every dollar donated makes it possible for The Food Bank to distribute $5 dollars worth of donated food.
[edit] Facilities
Since 1992, The Greater Boston Food Bank has been housed in a 60,000-square-foot facility in the Roxbury section of Boston. About 50,000 square feet of the facility is warehouse space, where The Food Bank accepts food deliveries and where most community agencies pick up orders. However, The Food Bank also operates two auxiliary warehouses in Harwich and Taunton, as well as satellite distribution sites in Middleboro, Natick and New Bedford, to facilitate distribution to outlying hunger-relief agencies.
[edit] Management
Day-to-day operations of The Greater Boston Food Bank are run by a three-person executive team: President and CEO Catherine D’Amato, who joined the organization in 1995 after heading up the Western Massachusetts and the San Francisco Food Banks; Chief Operating Officer Carol Tienken, who came onboard in 1999 after a career in Domestic and International Marketing at Polaroid Corporation; and Chief Financial Officer Kathleen Marre, who joined The Food Bank in 1997 after leading the Human Resources Departments at Mac-Gray Company, a commercial laundry firm, and Aldrich Eastman Waltch, a real estate advisory firm. The Food Bank is governed by a 20-member Board of Directors chaired by Vicary M. Graham, regional president of Mellon Private Wealth Management.
[edit] See also
• America’s Second Harvest • Capital Area Food Bank • Alameda County Community Food Bank
[edit] External Links
• Official web page (http://gbfb.org/)
