February 2007 Update

February will be a hectic month for the Food Bank. We’ve got a building expansion project gearing up, a program review by the Florida Department of Agriculture, several important conferences, the beginning of the application process for our children’s summer lunch programs as well as normal day to day operations!

The building expansion is being undertaken to improve our ability to handle bulk loads of donated foods from grocery stores and food drives as well as make better space available for assembling emergency food boxes. Many of our donations arrive in large containers with everything mixed together after having been pulled from store shelves or placed in a food drive barrel. We call the process of handling these types of items reclamation. Volunteers check the items for damaged or dated goods while sorting into categories, (canned vegetables in one group, boxed pasta in another, etc.). Following Hurricane Ivan in 2004, we found our space was too small to conduct sorting of items while also filling emergency food boxes for distribution. With Hurricane Katrina in 2005 we depended on the extreme generosity of a local church congregation who provided their entire complex of classrooms and sanctuary for boxing. The building expansion will increase our reclamation area by four fold and provide us with two processing lines so volunteers can sort and box at the same time. We’re busy with the initial design and contractor selection process with a goal of having the area completed by the height of the 2007 storm season, August 1st.

Each year we are inspected by various government entities from Alabama, Mississippi and Florida to ensure the government program funding we receive is being used appropriately. February will be an extended inspection by the Florida staff because inspections have fallen behind as a result of two heavy storm seasons and the associated work with the state staff in recovery operations. Several of our staff handling the Florida program are new to the process so the inspection will be a learning experience for them and will help them gain confidence in the fact that they are handling the program effectively.

And, even though June is a long way away, the application and training process for participation in the summer lunch program starts now. The staff is working with potential sites to determine if the location meets participation guidelines, has enough staff to support the program and can pass health and safety standards. By mid March we will need to have the locations locked in and the participation estimates in place, (as many as 2,000 children at over 30 sites are projected). We’ll then start coordinating the hiring and training of high school students for the kitchen operation, identify any additional equipment we’ll need to transport the food safely and complete all the paperwork for the applications for participation in Alabama and Mississippi. Running a 10 week summer lunch program service of over 50,000 lunches is not small task but we are committed to the idea of finding where children can safely congregate when school is out and ensuring they get a healthy lunch.

Hope winter treats you well! Have a great month!