Executive Director's update for April

April is shaping up to be a hectic month.

The plans for the building addition for our main warehouse in Theodore have been received from the architect and the Santa Rosa County Commissioners have approved our request to purchase two acres in the Santa Rosa Industrial Park for a new west Florida facility. We’ll be spending much of the month fine-tuning the Theodore plans so work can begin, with the goal of finishing in August, while having plans developed for the Florida facility so we can develop cost estimates and start looking for funding. Completing the Theodore project will help us do better in supporting disaster relief operations as well as provide a large kitchen for our child nutrition programs. The Florida facility became even more important in March when we signed the contract with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to add Bay, Washington and Holmes County to our service area this October. This shifts service to those counties from the Food Bank of the Big Bend, (located in Tallahassee) to us.

Our plans for summer lunch programs for children are on track thanks to the hard work of the child nutrition staff but the program is likely to gear up more than we planned as a result of programming problems causing a major summer lunch provider to cease participation. Our program has been focused mainly on filling gaps in summer lunch participation in vastly underserved rural areas. With 1,000 children involved, our program is not small, but it doesn’t come close to 5,000+ children in typical city efforts. So, what happens when a city program serving Mobile County ceases? Hopefully the school system will take over much of the effort but new gaps will exist that we’ll be asked to try and fill. It means a lot of coordination with the State Department of Education who run the overall program to try and assist in limiting the loss of access. The cessation of a long time program highlights the challenge of the federal reimbursement rates we deal with, lots of paperwork and oversight required to ensure the program is administered correctly but limited funding to cover the actual expenses of the program.

Added to the ‘regular’ stuff is the planning for our annual fundraiser, the Gourmet Chef Challenge. I don’t have to do much in planning this event but several of our board members, staff and other community volunteers are working to organize the set-up, publicize the event, collect donated auction items and sell tickets to the event. It all wraps up on May 1st when we expect 800 or so people to join us at the Mobile Convention Center to taste the dishes prepared by over twenty-five area chefs. I find the event a good way to try foods I’d never order on my own as well as test out restaurants I’ve never visited. Some of the items I tried my first year here led me to my favorite Mobile area restaurants and I still visit them today.