Executive Director's update for June

June has arrived and I just realized I failed to post a May entry. That sort of tells you how May went.

Our annual fundraising event, the Gourmet Chef Challenge, was held on May 1st and involved hundreds of people tasting the specialty dishes from Chefs from some of the best places in the Mobile area. The next morning I was off to Chicago for the final meeting of the Network’s disaster task force. For the past year fifteen food bank and national staff members have been working to refine planning related to the Network’s response to disaster through a series of teleconferences and meetings. Since most disasters come with no notice and take many different forms, trying to define a reasonable standard of performance for the 200 plus food banks in America involved a lot of research and discussion. As a way to help the network members understand the process, thanks to donations from Dunkin Donuts, three conferences are being conducted in Reno, Atlanta and Chicago. I participated in the first conference in Reno along with two other task forces members and we’ve passed the torch to other members for the next conference in Atlanta. Food Banks have a solid record of effective response; I think this latest effort will make it even better.

May also included continued progress on our construction efforts. We have permission from the County Commission to purchase two acres in the Santa Rosa Industrial Park for our west Florida facility and are now working on the building details. The Board approved the contract for the expansion of the Theodore warehouse to increase our ability to have mixed donated loads of food products and emergency food boxing. The construction company will begin work the week of June 11th and the project is expected to be completed in September. While the expansion project is underway we’ll also be doing some of the preparation work on the current reclamation and boxing area to get it ready to become and emergency kitchen capable of producing thousands of meals per day.

The emergency kitchen will be ready for our summer lunch program next year and will help us improve our support to children along the central gulf coast. This year’s summer lunch program started on June 6th and will be serving children at 30 sites once the Mississippi programs are approved to start, probably the week of June 18th. Right now we have five trucks traveling on routes to sites as far as 100 miles getting lunches which rotate between sandwiches, wraps and chef salads along with fruit and milk. Next year we expect to be able to serve more children and add hot meals to further expand the variety. If we can figure out the bureaucracy we’d like to eventually improve senior nutrition by making our kitchen available for senior meal delivery under some sort of meals on wheels program.

All this while we watch the weather forecast and hope that the hurricane predictors are as far off in the storm prediction this year as they were last year!

I would also like to add a special thanks to Mobile and surrounding areas for helping with the National Letter Carriers Food Drive. Your efforts helped us to collect over 180,000 pounds of food which was about 20,000 up from last year. Each year our local Letter Carriers 469 makes this possible for us. I would like to convey a special thank you to Eugene Williams, President of the local 469 and the letter carriers who make this food drive possible.