August 2008

In past writings, I have mentioned the importance of the Farm Bill to distribution throughout our Central Gulf Coast service area. I’ve also mentioned our serious shortage of food due to a reduction of national donations, probably as a result of the declining economy, (is it a recession yet?). Two weeks ago, staff members from the Alabama Food Banks met with the State’s food coordinator and spent over an hour discussing the impact of the Farm Bill’s $50 million in additional food purchases for FY2008. Donny Cooper and his staff in Montgomery have used Alabama’s funds to boost Alabama commodities to 100 truck loads of a great mix of food that will begin arriving in September and end in December. That equates to 800,000 pounds of food coming into the Bay Area Food Bank, about a 400,000 pound increase over what we’ve been seeing. Although the final details are not known, we can expect a similar ratio of increase for our Florida commodities program, equal to about 50,000 additional pounds per month. This will finally boost distribution to a level between 900,000 and 950,000 pounds per month as long as we can keep our donated food sources sending items at the rate we have seen thus far this year. The timing could not have been better. In July we distributed over 750,000 pounds of food,
but only received 525,000 pounds, a situation that would have meant serious shortages if it had continued more than 60 days.
Our summer lunch program for children ended on July 31st. This year we supported children at 29 sites in Mississippi and Alabama serving thousands of breakfasts, lunches and snacks. It provided a great shake-out of our kitchen as a high-production preparation site and helped us understand how to keep food safe when transporting it up to 100 miles to our rural sites. This fall we will be using grant funds to hire a chef to help us learn how to use the kitchen for enhanced snack programs and help educate seniors and children on preparing healthy foods.
Hurricane Season has been gentle to the Central Gulf Coast thus far, but storm systems are beginning to form off Africa and march across the central Atlantic. The next 6 weeks are traditionally the most intense for storms so we’ll be keeping a watchful eye while we hope that Dolly was the one storm predicted to touch the US Coastline this year. This past month, I completed training in disaster response provided by America’s Second Harvest along with Marcus Ditty, our Florida Branch Manager. The workshops were funded by Dunkin Donuts and were designed to help train a cadre of people from member food banks who will respond to assist staffs in any location a disaster overwhelms local capacity.
We’ll have staff busy training on the School Year At-Risk snack program with the Mississippi and Alabama Departments of Education this month. Staff members will be attending the Operations and Food Conference in Chicago learning about trends in food donations as well as upgrading food safety standards. And, we’ll be continuing to increase our work with individual Sam’s Clubs, Super Target and Publix Grocery stores as we continue to boost local donations.