Bay Area Food Bank Blog

2008 Holiday Season

2008-12-22T08:37:00.000-06:00

There have been numerous articles in the media and I have been talking a lot these past few months about the declining donations of food from manufacturers as a result of the recession. The federal government is searching for ways to bail out banks, car companies and even State governments faced with deficits. All the while, layoffs are reaching 50 year highs moving more people down the economic ladder instead of up. 2008 is certainly going out in a less than cheerful manner and I suspect many will grudgingly welcome 2009 on New Year’s Day since the projections are that things will only get worse.
Here along the Gulf Coast we do have some positives we can look at instead of always focusing on the negatives in the gloomy economy. The weather has been warmer than usual this fall so we’ve barely needed our heaters, lower gas bills in spite of rate increases for natural gas. Home prices never soared into that stratosphere, (except those condos on the beach) so we don’t see them falling like other places, fewer homes in which people owe more than they are worth. Even if slowed by the economic decline, the German steel plant being constructed and military ship construction will help replace jobs being lost as long as people are willing to retrain. I think many here will look at 2009 with the idea that they want it to come quickly so we can move past this down turn and get on with moving up the economic ladder.
So how does all this relate to the Food Bank and our mission of helping people? Well, 2008 has been a tough year. We’ve had a lot of media attention which has kept our phones busy with people seeking to find help. We’ve had a big decline in donated shelf stable food from national manufacturers which has caused us to reach out farther away for donations and pay higher freight costs to get it here. We’ve also had to change our expectations about national donations and shift to a stronger focus on local support through a store level pick-up effort. Store level pick-up is much harder and more expensive. Instead of 40,000 pounds arriving via tractor trailer in cases on shrink wrapped pallets, our drivers must make 70 to 80 stops at individual stores to pick-up 500 or 600 pounds of food of various types. That means this year we’ve spent a lot more money getting the same amount of donated food we got in 2007 and the warehouse staff and volunteers worked a lot harder as well.
People in the community are helping. We’ve had more food drives than ever thanks to concern from individuals, social groups and businesses. We’ve had a lot of media coverage with TV, radio and newspaper reporters taking an interest in learning about the challenges of helping people when times turn tough. And, thank goodness, individuals are helping with cash donations since many of the foundations who often provide support to non-profit organizations have seen revenue from their invested funds evaporate this year. As I look at 2009, I see a year that is going to continue to require growth of our store level donation effort and tightening of the budget belt to squeeze the most help we can provide as more families move down the economic ladder, hanging on until the economy turns around.

Response to Gustav

2008-09-04T12:54:00.000-06:00

It is now September 3rd. Gustav ruined Labor Day for most of the people along the coast, but for most of us it was just a windy, rainy day. Our warehouse distributed supplies to four Red Cross shelters opened in Mobile County for people living near the coast and people driving in from Mississippi or Louisiana. As it turned out, most kept going north or east after they passed Mobile, driving into northern Alabama or eastern Florida in case the storm made a last minute turn. Tuesday there was heavy traffic on the interstates heading south and west as people started to head home.
It appears that our primary support will be in the same areas of western coastal Mississippi hurt by Hurricane Katrina. We’ve received a load of food supplies from the Food Bank in Waterloo, Iowa that were left after the spring flooding they worked through. We’ll also be getting a load of cleaning supplies the end of this week and perhaps another load or two of food supplies next week. Our Emergency Pantry sites in Hancock, Harrison and Pearl River Counties have all checked in and are providing reports of light demand but low food supplies. They also expect demand to increase in two or three days because most people have not yet returned. We’ll be listening in on disaster related conference calls to identify the areas with the most need and try and supply the related pantries with food and cleaning supplies Friday so they are ready to help people over the weekend.
So far the impact of Gustav in our Coastal service area looks on the level of Hurricane Dennis which struck the west Florida area about six weeks before Hurricane Katrina. That operation involved distribution of about 200,000 pounds of food and cleaning products over a period of three weeks and cost about $30,000 in operation expenses. What we can expect to see is some neighborhoods suffering from water damage in virtually all homes and without power for a week or longer, while neighborhoods within sight have almost no damage and have power restored in several days. Many of the poorest families will have access to stores that are open but will be short on money. This makes the food and cleaning supplies distributed by the small local church pantries and non-profit organizations very important since return of public services usually triggers the pull-out of Red Cross feeding vehicles. This will be especially true now as Red Cross will have to plan on shuffling assets to be ready for the Atlantic storms threatening other coastal areas 500 to 1,000 miles away.

September 2008 - As Gustav Approaches

2008-08-29T10:30:00.001-06:00

I am writing the September blog a few days early since we’ve got the Labor Day weekend coming up. Gustav is moving toward the Gulf of Mexico and seriously threatens to wreak havoc on some portion of the Gulf Coast early next week. What it means for staff at the Bay Area Food Bank, as well as those at the food banks in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston and farther west, is a frantic effort to get our warehouses organized to jump into action as soon as Gustav makes its eventual landfall known. It also means staff members will be participating in conference calls through the weekend with State and Local Emergency Management networks to continue to plan for direct relief, should the storm impact locally, or support to our neighbors should the storm make landfall outside our service area.
While the storm tracks are very sketchy at this point, it looks like our warehouse, (and my house!) are at the eastern edge of the probable path. But, our service area stretches another 100 miles west, which makes it much more likely winds will impact portions of our area and thousands of people will be on the roads moving out of the strike zone. I’ve been exchanging warehouse status reports, contact numbers and plans with the directors of the other coastal food banks as well as the staff in the national office so everyone can be as ready as possible. Meanwhile, the staff has been busy distributing shelter supplies, topping off the tanks on all vehicles, clearing space for the arrival of emergency supplies and going through checklists to ensure we leave the warehouse Friday afternoon ready to jump into action once the storm passes, probably Tuesday.
The threat of a storm causes financial loss even if there is no direct damage to property and that’s one of the challenges we always face following a storm. Thousands of hourly workers will be forced to pack their family in a car, travel 300 or 400 miles inland and spend three or four days away waiting to return. Not only does this mean lost wages, it means hundreds of dollars for meals, gas and lodging. Evacuation for a storm can easily cost $500 at the same time a working couple loses $500 in wages. For a great number of people, this places them in tough financial straights and in the coming weeks we can expect the volume of requests for food from the church pantries that form the bedrock of support to increase.
Next week, you can expect an update telling you what Gustav has meant to us here along the Central Gulf Coast. It may find us busy serving local citizens. We may have staff shifted to a neighboring food bank. Or, we may all be happily poking fun at weather forecasters for missing the mark after a minor storm comes quietly ashore. We’re planning for the worst but hoping for the best.

August 2008

2008-08-12T07:44:00.001-06:00

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.

June update 2008

2008-06-04T15:24:00.001-06:00

The Farm Bill has passed! After months of delay and a presidential veto there is finally a bill with enough funding in place to start increasing the flow of food back to Food Banks and Pantries towards the levels we saw five years ago before inflation ate away at the funds. The new bill has a provision to adjust funding based on price increases so we hope to see a stable volume of food over the five years covered by the bill. It could not come at a more important time, with fuel prices continuing to go up and food prices following closely behind. We hope to see increased shipments into the warehouse within the next 60 days as state administrators receive funding allocations and order food. It is particularly important to us because our monthly total of inbound food remains about 100,000 pounds behind our goal with requests for support up about 15%, meaning we need about 150,000 pounds more each month than we have been getting. Our staff has significantly increased their contact with local grocers to increase local donations but local donations alone will not solve the problem.

Our summer lunch program for children started on June 2^nd using food prepared in our new kitchen facility following a ribbon cutting ceremony on May 29^th. Congressman Jo Bonner helped cut the ribbon and spoke of the importance of the kitchen in feeding children from financially strapped families as well as the potential role of producing thousands of meals daily for the community following any future severe storm along the central gulf coast. The kitchen will be supporting 25 lunch sites serving free lunches to as many as 1,800 children under the federal Summer Lunch Program. We’ve hired 8 high school students and two school cafeteria supervisors for the effort as well as four drivers to delivery the lunches each day. I see the kitchen as a real win-win-win. We have an asset that supports youth programs year round, is instantly available following disaster and provides work experience to teenagers.

Hurricane Season began on June 1^st which is the trigger for our staff to update phone rosters, check our emergency generator, review safety procedures and cross our fingers that we won’t need to make use of any of the preparations! For those who don’t live on the gulf coast consider this, the water temperature on the Alabama gulf coast this morning was 86 degrees. That’s higher than usual thanks to a hot start to the season and water temperature has a big impact on the strength of storms. I’ve got my fingers crossed hoping for a cooling trend later in the month before any big tropical weather patterns start to work into the Caribbean.

June will not be a lazy month for us. America’s Second Harvest has made a decision to change their name and brand in an effort to be more visible to the general public. Three of our staff will be attending a conference in Chicago to understand the transition. Others will be attending training as volunteers for the network’s disaster response teams. And, all of us will be checking records and processes in preparation for our America’s Second Harvest compliance audit, conducted every two years and designed to ensure we’re managing food donations within the guidelines of the Network as well as government.

May 2008 Update

2008-05-27T07:15:00.001-06:00

I was looking forward to talking about the passage of the Farm Bill for this month’s blog so I kept holding back on writing it. Well, it is now Memorial Day weekend and the Farm Bill has passed, kind of….The House and Senate pounded out an agreement, got enough votes in both houses to override a veto, the president Vetoed the bill as expected and then, in the process of overriding the Veto, they discovered an incomplete bill was voted on! The process has to be fixed by a new set of votes, a new veto and then a set of votes to override the veto. If congress was like the guy who fixes your car and forgets to put the tire on, it would stay until the work was done. But, short of a national emergency, government doesn’t work like that. Government is in recess for the Holiday so it will probably be two more weeks before the final bill becomes law and the increased volume of food we’ve been hoping for will begin flowing our way. Two weeks delay means another 50,000 pounds of commodities we won’t have available to distribute in spite of a drastically increased need in the communities we serve. If these were normal times human error of this sort would not have had such a significant impact. Because the Farm Bill is already a full year late, each delay is significant.

The rising price of fuel is continuing to spread problems across the nation. For several years the trucking industry has placed a fuel charge on bills to show their rate plus the additional fee incurred due to the rising cost of diesel. For us, each 5 cent per gallon rise in diesel increases our freight bill for the year by $2,000. Thinking back to the costs six months ago when we prepared our budget, we’re spending well over $50,000 more than we thought we would just to get donated food into the warehouse. And not one dime of that has gone to help the trucker do his job. Of course we’re now seeing the cost of processing food impact the cost of the food when it reaches the grocer. More people are finding it harder to make ends meet and are turning to church pantries for help. So, we need to bring in more food even though it costs more for each load that arrives at the same time our generous donors are seeing their own pocketbooks becoming a little emptier than before. Wind power, solar power, nuclear power and new drilling will take years to work through the research, environmental impact and exploration processes. The need for help is not going to go away any time soon and may continue to grow.

I spent time this week attending the Mississippi/Alabama Hurricane Conference in Mobile. It is good to know government leaders in both States are thinking about plans and are also adjusting plans because they know the cost of fuel is going to impact decisions by citizens related to the cost of evacuation when a call to evacuate is made. A false alarm can cost a family a week’s wages due to missed work as well as hundreds of dollars in fuel, hotel and meal costs. For many working families an evacuation robs them of any chance to take a family vacation. Spending 15 hours (each way) crawling along the interstate and eating meals in overcrowded fast food restaurants is not relaxing and can’t compare to a week at Disneyworld, but it costs just a much! With everything else going on, we need a quiet storm season.

April 2008. Moving forward!

2008-04-09T13:29:00.000-06:00

Another month has gone by and the Farm Bill is still not passed. Nothing related to our food crisis has changed so I won’t rehash what I said last month. Congress needs to pass the Farm Bill.

Our kitchen project is coming along. If you walked into the 1600 square foot area it covers, I think you would recognize it as a kitchen under construction with huge range hoods, a walk-in cooler, sinks, etc. We expect the entire process to be completed in late April and will begin a test phase in May to ensure it’s ready for the start of our Summer Lunch service, a program that serves children, which begins June 2. In addition, the kitchen is also ready to serve the entire community as a disaster relief meal production site should any serious storm touch the Central Gulf Coast.

Construction of our Florida branch facility has not started. But, permit requests for initiation of the project have been submitted to the officials in Santa Rosa County and once approved, the land clearing and preparation will begin. We have begun seeking funding support from various foundations and organizations for racking equipment, emergency power and other items needed to make the best possible use of the warehouse. The new warehouse will significantly improve our ability to provide fresh and frozen food to the church pantries, soup kitchens and residential programs we serve. So we are very anxious to finish this project!

May is an important month for us, so we have already starting working with the Letter Carriers and postal officials to get ready for the annual Letter Carriers Food Drive, May 10^th. Food Banks across America participate, but the results of the Food Drive are particularly important for us with our coastal location. We will be checking and sorting all the donations collected by the Letter Carriers and then place most of it in our storage racks to hold as an emergency food reserve through the summer. If a storm should hit, the food will be distributed during the first days following the storm while roads are cleared and supplies from outside the area begin to arrive. If no storms hit, we’ll breathe a sigh of relief and use the food as part of our distribution effort this fall. Wherever you are, mark May 10^th on your calendar and hang some canned goods on your mail box. It is guaranteed to help someone.

Enjoy the spring weather!

Rising cost and less money

2008-03-18T15:32:00.000-06:00

Congress continues to debate the Farm Bill in joint committee and a pending recess means a solution remains months into the future. Remember, this is the 2007 Farm Bill which should have resulted in improved funding of food programs beginning last October. Meanwhile, prices of food and fuel climb and more families become stressed in making ends meet. The March 1st edition of The Non-Profit Times has an extensive article about the problems facing food banks in relation to increased transportation costs and a declining level of donations from national suppliers and from the government commodities program.
We certainly see a shortage of donated food and commodities here on the gulf coast. After posting increases in food distribution each year since constructing our Theodore warehouse in 2000, we have the potential in 2008 of posting a decline in food distribution of the first time. This is disheartening because at the same time our resources may be declining, recession and price increases are forcing more and more people to seek help when their month expenses exceed their pay check. The $1 a gallon price increase can add $50 to $60 per month to the cost of going to work every day while spiking prices for bread, milks and eggs capture an additional $20 or so to a food bill. In a region with an average household income of $37,000, an extra $100 in expenses just to stay where you are financially is a burden for many, many people.
We are doing what we can. Four staff members just completed training on finding new sources of food. We’ve gotten the attention of some local food sources and will begin picking up additional food locally to help off-set the decline in national donations. We’ve met with our elected officials and know they understand our challenges and also support getting the Farm Bill through the process as rapidly as possible. We’re expanding our child nutrition program to additional sites to help families indirectly through after school snack programs.
What can’t we expect? State funding support is unlikely to grow because state budgets in Florida and Alabama are down. United Way programs can generally be expected to have a tough year since more people will feel the strain of increased living costs and reduce donations. So, even though United Way recognizes the problems of feeding people, they may not be able to assist us with additional funds.
The Farm Bill needs to be passed and we need to find ways to do the most we can with what we have. People won’t starve. But, people will be forced to make choices between healthy foods and cheap foods or watering down a gallon of milk to save money for the power bill.

February Update

2008-02-12T14:26:00.000-06:00

Most of the Food Banks in the US depend on a number of different sources for food. One of the keys sources is the Commodities program administered by the US Department of Agriculture as provided for in the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill operates on a five year appropriation cycle and includes many additional programs accounting for billions of tax dollars. A new farm bill is now five months overdue. Unfortunately, the commodities portion of the farm bill has suffered fund issues related to the stalled bill and other quirks related to the past bill that have result in a huge reduction in the amount of food crossing the docks of food banks for follow on distribution to the organizations we work with and eventually to people needing help. How drastic? In 2003 $396 million was spent on food for the Commodities program while $191 million was spent in 2007. When you factor in inflation, the buying power of the 2007 funding is somewhere in the range of 40% of what it was in 2003. That means Food Banks have to find millions of additional pounds of food from new sources just to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, economic conditions are causing new people among the working poor to turn to pantries for help. The reduction in Commodities amounts to over 1 million pounds per year for the Bay Area Food Bank so a new farm bill, restoring commodities flow is becoming critical.
While on the subject of sources of food, for the past six months we have seen a significant decline in the volume of donated truckloads of food from national sources. All the major food producers and handlers provide food donations through America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network. The decline in donations is probably a result of reduced production and a resulting reduction in unpurchased items available for donation. Another, scarier, possibility is that computer modeling is allowing industry to better predict market trends. Better trend information would give food producers a better idea of how much they will sell. Therefore, they cut excess by buying, boxing, canning and freezing less food and still not run out. Great for the stock holders but not so great for those who can’t afford the items to begin with! Packaging less may also explain an upswing in offers of fresh produce. Fresh fruits and vegetables are certainly healthier for everyone but most of the church pantries we support can’t store the items for long periods of time so they are available when a family comes seeking help. A permanent decline in national donated goods would significantly increase the challenge of meeting need.
I’ll keep you posted throughout the year on the farm bill and the national donations-hopefully both will improve!

2008-01-08T10:24:00.001-06:00

Looking back at what I said one year ago I’m happy to say we were able to tackle the biggest challenges, reaching 10 million pounds of distribution and doing something about senior nutrition. In spite of significant reductions in national donations we came within 2% of our goal of distributing 10 million pounds of food. Increasing the challenge was a continued decline in the amount of food provided by the federal commodities program due to level funding and increased food costs. With a goal of 11 million pounds in 2008 the staff is already working to think up ways more food donations while keeping fingers crossed that the Federal Farm Bill will pass will higher funding levels to increase the volume of commodities we receive. In mid-year we were also able to start a nutrition program targeted at seniors to frail to leave their homes to take advantage of public services. The program is being run by Lisa Davis and was begun with funds from a $10,000 grant provided through the United Way from the National Football League. Lisa has spent five months working with senior centers and churches around the Mobile area identifying over 200 seniors in need and connecting volunteers to the effort of delivering the food.
We can expect 2008 to be just as busy as last year. Our new 4,000 square foot boxing and sorting area will allow us to call on more volunteers and sort more food. Construction of our emergency kitchen will begin shortly and, when completed, we’ll learn how to make use of the equipment to improve the snacks we provide in our after school nutrition program as well as our summer lunch program. We’ll be overseeing the construction of our new facility in Milton, Florida, racing to complete the facility before a serious storm calls for its use and before our leased facility is sold by the landlord. We’ll be looking at grant opportunities to provide enough funds for a full 12 month senior nutrition program for the 200 seniors we now have in the program as well as additional funds to expand the program to help others. The staff will also be working with our volunteer Board of Directors in a capital campaign to raise $500,000 for the 4,000 square foot addition and the Kitchen at Theodore warehouse as well as $200,000 to begin paying for the Milton facility. We can expect new challenges but I expect to see new successes as we move through the year.
The Food Bank is all about helping people. We expect 2008 to be no different and will work to do it cost effectively so more can be helped.

A Critical Time

2007-11-30T11:59:00.000-06:00

The New York Times published an article on November 30th about the low stock on hand at America’s food banks. A combination of factors caused the situation. Farm commodity spending has been flat for 5 years while inflation has increased the cost of the food purchased. Donated food levels have declined due to belt tightening and production improvements by food manufacturers. Secondary buyers have purchased items to sell in discount stores that were previously donated. Increased fuel, medical and utilities have forced more people to seek help. Sadly, the Bay Area Food Bank is suffering worse shortages than those mentioned by food banks interviewed in the Times article.

Beginning in July, we started seeing distribution surpass arriving food by 100,000 pounds per month as our routine sources of food dried up. That was a 20% decline. We normally look to food sources within about 750 miles of the food bank to keep trucking costs low. Today we’re looking anywhere we can to find food. As a result, we expect our trucking costs to increase by as much as 50% compared to past years due to the combination of increased per-mile fees because of the rising cost of diesel and increased distance hauled to get the food to the warehouse. Even looking everywhere for food, we are still not finding enough.

One shot in the arm we need to help solve our ills resides in the 2007 Farm Bill which has been stalled in the Senate. Both the House version and the Senate version call for significant increases in funding, the first in 5 years, to help restore the volume of food being passed on to those in need. For the Bay Area Food Bank passage of either version would increase our food supply by 1 million pounds per year. Inaction on the part of the Senate or a Presidential veto that causes the funding bill to be pushed to 2008 essentially guarantees continued decline in commodities for another year at a time it is needed more than ever due to declines in the donated food stream.

In my seven plus years at the Food Bank we have always been in a position of seeing need and developing ways to increase support. Building the facility, adding trucks, and increasing the number of organizations we work with has helped us play catch-up with the level of service provided by well established food banks found in most major urban areas. This problem is different. We are now faced with the challenge of preserving the progress we have made. It will probably involve new ways of thinking and programs targeted to do the most good. It looks like 2008 will be a very interesting year.

October Update

2007-10-02T15:08:00.001-06:00

Well we’ve reached October with no significant storm along our portion of the gulf coast and the weather forecasters are not predicting anything for the near future. That’s great news because beginning on October 1 we added three new Florida counties to our service area. We are now responsible for serving communities along approximately 350 miles of coastline. A quiet storm season means we can concentrate on those in need every day instead of rushing to support those suddenly homeless. It also means plans and scheduling for our warehouse expansion can continue to move forward without rain delays and that we can be operational in our new processing area by early November.

I’m writing this during a break at America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network’s annual conference. Over 100 people from the various network members and the national staff have been working for the past year on developing a new strategic plan to meet the needs of America’s working poor as the economy changes and as the food industry changes. Much of the conference time on Sunday and Monday was spent in small group information sessions look at the various portions of the plans as they have been developed. It is a complex yet vital process because it involves understanding what government programs will be providing in the coming years as well as what remains to be done. The Network goal is to increase service to the needy by 1 million people per year for the next five years through encouraging improvements in government programs and distribution of more food through the network. Along the way we are forming great national partnerships with organizations like Dunkin Donuts, The Country Music Television Network, Pampered Chef and Kraft Foods. For my part, I was involved with the Disaster Relief Task Force which gave a formal report to the over 500 people attending the conference. As a result of our report, the national office is hiring a highly experienced person to serve as disaster support director, increasing the disaster reserve funds three fold, pre-positioning loads of initial relief supplies at select locations and preparing a training course to train 10 teams of experienced people from across the nation to serve as first responders to help food banks ramp up operations following a disaster. The national conference is a fast paced four day event that helps all of us in the network see the big picture while handling our own slice of the mission day-to-day.

A quiet storm season does not mean we will have a quiet October. Agency support staff will be getting acquainted with over 20 new agencies in Bay, Holmes and Washington Counties of west Florida. The food coordinators will be working with the Mobile County School System on a week long fund drive in recognition of World Hunger Day. The communications staff will be working to set up a ribbon cutting event for our warehouse addition as well as a ground breaking for our new Milton facility construction. And, throughout the process the distribution staff will be going about the core task of unloading, sorting and then distributing about 25 tractor trailer loads of food as they do every month.

Second Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

2007-08-29T12:19:00.000-06:00

Today marks the 2^nd anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. Since that landfall made such a large impact on the Bay Area Food Bank, our Mississippi service area and the rest of America in the weeks that followed, I figured it was a good theme to lead off my September update. Today lots of media will cover the recovery efforts still going on, work still waiting to be done and work already completed. It will largely focus on possessions lost and possessions gained and ignore all the things it took to get to the state we are today. Not so this time two years ago. In the weeks following landfall people worried about just finding a place to sleep, a meal to eat and a way to contact loved ones. People thanked strangers for simple gestures of kindness and shared whatever they had with others. Today arguments swirl around the level of preparedness individuals should be expected to take, the height to which homes in the flood plain should be elevated, whether insurance, the government or the individual should pay for damage and how much money should be spent protecting homes built on barrier islands, the city of New Orleans and/or the coastal swamp communities of Louisiana.

For me the good news is that our job at the Food Bank does not involve working among the anger over not being helped enough, arguments about placing blame, legal decisions related to blame or the task of finding the billions of dollars for a government solution that may or may not be government’s to solve. We deal in stage one- getting food to people who need it now. That’s no small challenge in itself and involves preparation at our warehouse, the organizations we support and among the staff of America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network. The millions upon millions of pounds of food distributed in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita allowed people to move beyond a simple need for food and shelter. We can be proud of the effort thousands of people undertook in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with no expectation of gain, except the satisfaction of helping someone who needed help. Having spent the past 15 months working with members of the national staff and staffs from other Food Banks on improvements in our network disaster plan, I can say that America’s Second Harvest is ready to help again if needed. The construction at our Theodore warehouse undertaken to expand our capacity along with the 20 emergency response pantries we’ve placed along the Alabama and Mississippi Coast are the Bay Area Food Bank’s effort to do more, faster in the future. Today may be a time when most look back. We’re focused on looking forward, continuing our day to day mission while preparing for a future storm. No major depressions forming in the tropics today, that’s good news!

Executive Director's update for August

2007-08-17T15:35:00.000-06:00

Well we’re half way through August and the Atlantic and Gulf Coast has had a quiet hurricane season so far. Of course, I saw a historical weather chart the other day that shows that tropical activity peaks on September 10th and the most active days are 15 days on either side. It now looks like Hurricane Dean will become a pest to someone on the coast right at the front end of the 15 day side, around August 22nd or 23rd. All the weather people are pointing speculatively towards the western gulf, which is good news for us. We’re still plenty busy with the construction of the warehouse addition, no roof yet, so we’d prefer to be fairly rain free until the roof is on.

One thing our recent experience with storms has provided us is the background to prepare better. Our file servers are on rolling carts for movement to the strongest areas of the facility. We’ve got wireless laptops as well as wireless plugs and standby batteries for the desktop computers. We can protect inventory and information files and begin distribution operations even if the office complex is damaged. We’ve got a stash of plastic to cover areas if the roof springs a leak, extra fuel for the generator and updated phone lists. In one sense we’re lucky that our most likely disaster is a hurricane because we get lots of notice as it moves our way. It is much more challenging for those faced with sudden disasters like earth quakes.

Last week I spent a full day in Chicago along with ten members of the America’s Second Harvest national staff and four other food bank directors discussing strategic goals related to childhood hunger. Childhood hunger, or lack of proper nutrition, is one of those issues I can wrap my arms around. Kids live day to day with the cards they are dealt. Yet, with a good basic education and good health, their potential in America is unlimited.

Tuesday I was part of the strategic plan development process to ensure proper emphasis is placed in the right areas to achieve the overall goal of reducing hunger by 1 million people per year for the next five years. It is estimated that 400,000 of the 1 million each year will be children. Figuring out how to balance use of a finite amount of energy and money to impact programs like food stamps, after school snacks, food pantry distributions and summer lunches in the most effective way possible is no easy task. No single program can do it all so we spent a lot of time trying to identify ways to track improvement. Knowing what is working will help us focus better. For example, food stamp participation rates might improve if we advocate for a simpler application process in states with low participation rates while in other states, improvement may take the form of financial support to cover the additional costs associated with serving people in widely dispersed rural areas. I was encouraged by the level of concern on the part of everyone in the work session and believe a good balance of advocacy, funding and personal energy can make things better for millions of people. To me, children are the highest priority.

Executive Director's update for July

2007-07-05T13:39:00.000-06:00

As I write this on July 5th there is the sound of a jack hammer in the background and the parking area is full of trucks as a crew works on the cinder block walls for the building expansion. Real progress is being made and, with a quiet storm season thus far, we couldn’t be happier. July will continue steady progress on improving our capacity. The loan paperwork to complete the construction at the Theodore facility has just been completed so we can pay the contractors for the work being done, I’m sure they think that’s a good thing! In a week we expect the Santa Rosa County Commission to complete action on the sale of our two acre parcel for the west Florida facility and two weeks later approve a bond action that will help us finance construction of that building.

We’ve had several meetings and discussions with the Florida facility design team and they have started development of actual design plans. We are aiming at keeping the initial project at $1 million while creating a facility of approximately 14,000 square feet. That’s all we can afford but should give us a building capable of supporting west Florida for several years as we grow distribution from 1.75 million pounds annually to over 3 million pounds. At that point we’ll add more warehouse space to allow growth towards our long range goal of over five million pounds of distribution annually. With distribution over 5 million pounds we will finally be able to say that the people of west Florida are getting the level of support they need and deserve compared to other locations in America. Combined with our Alabama and Mississippi distribution we will be distributing approximately 15 million pounds of food annually.

Financing two $1 million dollar projects at once is a challenge. The Board and staff of the Food Bank feel that it is necessary in order to help the hunger relief efforts being conducted by the hundreds of organizations we support reach the level already achieved in other parts of the country. The additional warehouse space will allow us to bring in more donated food and make it available for distribution. The Emergency Kitchen will allow us to expand our child nutrition program with hot snacks during the school year and a rotation of hot and cold lunches during the summer. Of course, should a disaster occur, we will have a facility capable producing thousands of meals per day for distribution in cooperation with organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army. Both the new building addition and the kitchen area will be highly storm resistant to allow staff to shelter prior to a storm and immediately begin support following a storm. To make all this happen the Board has created a fundraising committee that will be working with the staff to find foundations and businesses will to help us pay off 50% of the money we’re investing to ensure we have enough money after mortgage payments to improve operations. It is not an easy task but one we need to do to what is best for the community. So, if you happen to have $200,000 or $300,000 laying around let us know and well show you a very worthy way to use it!

Executive Director's update for June

2007-06-18T10:47:00.000-06:00

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.

Executive Director's update for April

2007-04-03T13:44:00.000-06:00

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.

March 2007 Update

2007-03-13T11:28:00.001-06:00

March is passing quickly and so far all of the news for the Food Bank is positive.

We’re dealing with construction in Alabama, possible construction in Florida and expansion of child nutrition programs in Alabama and Mississippi.

Our Board of Directors reviewed the building expansion project at the March 6th Board meeting and approved the funding of the addition via a loan while also selecting the company that will build the addition. Thanks to a complex financing transaction we will be able to wrap our existing mortgage and the expansion project together at a rate which results in payments only slightly above our current mortgage. This project will allow us to do a better job in handling more product without a large increase in operating costs. It will also provide the space for our disaster/kids café kitchen so we can provide prepared food here rather than rent space elsewhere.

If you’ve looked over the web site you know we have a small leased Branch facility in Pace Florida which supports the four Florida counties that are part of our designated service area. Our long range plans called for development of a warehouse of our own, sized to meet our needs. The need for a facility has been pressed forward by notification that the owners may sell the building we now occupy. We’ve been in discussion with Santa Rosa County officials to identify and purchase land for a facility to replace the leased warehouse. We hope to have the details locked in shortly so we can develop the cost estimates for construction of a west Florida Branch that will meet the areas day to day needs as well as the disaster support needs. This means increased refrigerated and frozen capacity, easier access from Interstate 10, emergency power and a structure capable of sheltering staff in severe storms so they are ready to serve immediately after a storm passes.

Child Nutrition Programs continue to be an active issue. The Alabama Department of Education contacted us in February about the potential loss of one of last year’s big summer lunch sponsors to see if we could expand to fill a portion of the gap the sponsor will leave. We can’t fill all the needs so we’ll be working to identify the most critical sites, those with the poorest access to other sites, to help as best we can this year. Our big limiting factor is the production capacity of the kitchen we use at the Abby Berg Senior Center, solved next year with our new kitchen. Meanwhile, we’ve submitted our sponsorship packet to the Mississippi Department of Education and expect to become fully active as a Child and Adult Care Feeding Program sponsor in Mississippi the first of April. This designation allows us to get partial reimbursement for program costs with our after school program, reducing the amount of donated funds needs to expand and take care of more children.

That’s it for March.

February 2007 Update

2007-02-09T15:55:00.000-06:00

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!

January 2007 update

2006-12-28T14:28:00.000-06:00

2006 is over and we’re off to a new, exciting start in 2007. We’re hoping for another quiet storm season along the gulf coast this summer and have set a goal of distributing 10 million pounds of food this year. 2005 saw us distribute over 16 million pounds and 2006 over 13 million pounds as a result of continued hurricane recovery support. Prior to 2005 we were moving from 4 million pounds of distribution prior to our 2000 move to our new warehouse, towards 10 million pounds of non-storm related distribution. The 10 million pound goal will be a challenge for us. Budgets for government commodities programs are expected to be flat while the price of food has increased so we’ll get less food through the government programs. This means we’ll depend more than ever on the major national donations provided through America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network while expanding our search for locally available food now being thrown away at grocers or food distributors. To meet this challenge we’re moving one employee to search for new food donations full time. We’ll also seek out well priced wholesale key nutritional items that may not be present in the donated product and purchase those food items. The purchased program requires thousands of additional dollars annually but is important in maintaining a healthy diet.

We are also going to increase our focus on nutrition this year by adding senior nutrition initiatives to our existing child nutrition efforts. Our 2005 Hunger Study indicates a significant number of seniors and children receive food through our programs and for them, decisions between paying rent, utilities and medicine versus purchasing food are common. Yet, a healthy diet improves mental and physical growth while decreasing the need for medical care. By increasing our senior nutrition knowledge we plan to target our food collection and distribution to be as effective as possible at keeping seniors healthier so their quality of life can improve even on fixed incomes. We’ll also seek funds to create a food box program targeted towards seniors similar to the Federal Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP). The CSFP program is not fully funded so it is provided in only a limited number of States, Alabama and Florida are among the unfunded States. We estimate that senior food program will cost $7.00 per box, so for 120 seniors to receive a box each month for a year, we will need a little over $10,000.
The Food Bank is all about helping people. We expect 2007 to be no different and will work to do it cost effectively so more can be helped.

December 2006 Update

2006-12-18T10:37:00.000-06:00

It is already halfway through the month and I am just getting around to posting my December blog. That’s pretty normal for this time of year. The Food Bank runs all operations on a calendar year so along with the Holidays, we have a new set of Board Members to orient on their responsibilities, establishment of goals for the coming year and development of a budget that will support the goals. At the same time, we have a number of organizations who invite us to functions to present donation checks as well as TV and radio interviews to talk about how things are during the holiday season. In short, it is just plain busy.

Of course 2006 is a lot quieter than 2004 (post Ivan) and 2005 (post Katrina) but sadly, there remains a lot of support to be done for the thousands still out of their homes on the Gulf Coast and those in their homes but facing cost increases at a pace much more rapid than wage increases. We still end November of this year with over 1 million pounds of food distributed for the month. I’ve got some of the staff reviewing the costs of maintaining a young family in Pensacola, Foley, Mobile, Gulfport and some of the smaller rural communities to try and capture information on when a family stops struggling to make ends meet. It certainly is not when eligibility for Food Stamps ends. We intend to focus on that next year to help us better understand and inform the organizations we work with some all of us can help more.

We have also been busy focusing on future disasters. Dave Krepcho of the Orlando Food Bank, Mike Manning of the Baton Rouge Food Bank and 10 other food banks across the nation are working on a new disaster manual with America’s Second Harvest- The Nation’s Food Bank Network staff members. We have now met three times and conducted numerous teleconferences as part of an effort to gain from recent disaster recovery experience in planning for future relief work. All of the Food Bank representatives have supported relief operations in the past ranging from hurricanes to floods to fires and we’re trying to create a flexible plan that rapidly supports an area without cumbersome rules. Traveling to Chicago for 12 hours of meetings and then back home is not a lot of fun, but I think it helps us stay focused on the effort and interested in doing a good job.

That’s it for now, I hope all of you have a chance to be with family and enjoy the Christmas holiday before it is time to get back in the swing of things for 2007!

October 2006 Update

2006-10-03T08:20:00.000-06:00

Water temperature is a critical factor in development of strong Hurricanes. As we reach the peak of Hurricane season each August, I start watching the daily paper for the water temperature at Dauphin Island, just south of Mobile. In August the water temperature reaches 90 degrees some days and is rarely below 88 degrees the entire month. Hurricane Katrina fed on the extreme heat last year when it came ashore in late august. Today the temperatures outside will be in the high 80’s and low 90’s just like August. But, the water temperature at Dauphin Island is a relatively cool 80 degrees. That’s great news because it means even if a late year Hurricane develops, it won’t be able to build the strength that Katrina did. With nothing forming in the Caribbean, I don’t think the gulf will see even a small hurricane this season. That’s great news because it gives everyone still busy rebuilding that much longer to complete their most critical work.

I’m currently part of a group of 15 from across America’s Second Harvest working to update the disaster plan for the network. We’ve got a deadline of June 1st to establish new guidelines that account for the lessons learned from the 2005 Hurricane season in a plan that meets the need, large and small, regardless of type of disaster. The network support of the Bay Area Food Bank was tremendous following Hurricane Katrina and the new plan is going to capture all the things done right to help keep response timely and effective no matter when or where the next disaster strikes.

For the Food Bank calm weather this time of year means we can move ahead with our fall food drive held by schools throughout Mobile County while building the food boxes to go along with the 1,600 turkeys we plan to distribute to over 150 of the agencies we work with throughout the year. They’ll be cooking them for group dinners or passing them on to families. This year we’re also busy distributing food boxes provided through various grants to help those still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. One recent recipient wrote that the 40 pound box of food she received allowed her to buy $75 worth of sheet rock for repairing the house she would have otherwise spent on groceries. For those caught under-insured by rapidly rising repair costs, recover assistance comes in many forms.

Our Board of Directors spends this time each year looking for new board members and selecting a new group of board officers to guide the Food Bank in the coming year. This is no small task since all Board Members are unpaid volunteers. Steering a multi-million dollar organization responsible for honest, effective handling of $20,000,000 in donated food for no compensation is a big thing to ask. In my six years with the Food Bank, the budget has doubled, the staff has doubled and distribution of food has increased four fold. That’s the mark of a very successful organization, focused on the mission of feeding people in a cost effective manner. It is a tribute to the Board’s dedication and interest in helping others.

Remembering Katrina, looking toward the future

2006-09-07T09:00:00.000-06:00

The Food Bank recognized August 29th, the 1 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with two ribbon cutting ceremonies. The first, at 8:30 AM, was conducted at the Theodore warehouse with the help of Congressman Jo Bonner and recognized the arrival of our tractor trailer. Valerie Day was also there, representing Senator Sessions. The Tractor is a single rear axle unit which makes it shorter than the large over the road rigs while the refrigerated trailer is 34 feet long compared to the standard 54 foot trailer. This combination makes the rig over 25 short than a standard rig and the smaller size combined with a power rear lift gate makes the unit better suited for parking lot operations for disaster relief. At 11:30 AM we had a ribbon cutting ceremony at Liberty Church of God in Gautier, Mississippi to recognize them as a new addition to our Emergency Response Pantry site list. The pantry sites are each equipped with a walk-in refrigeration unit and an emergency generator so that they can operate immediately following a disaster. Funding for both initiatives was provided through a $500,000 grant from America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network. When completed this fall there will be 21 Emergency Pantry sites spread across coastal Alabama and Mississippi to which we’ll be able to dispatch our new tractor trailer and other small refrigerated trucks in any future disaster relief situation.

That’s not the only thing that is keeping the staff busy! Our emergency food box program, funded through donations and grants, kept volunteers busy throughout the month producing over 2,000 emergency boxes for distribution. These boxes are part of a long term recovery effort to assist those trying the repair their homes and rebuild their lives. We anticipate continuing this program through the remainder of 2006.

The warehouse passed another minor milestone at the end of August as well. The last of our damage repair contracts was completed. Hurricane Katrina stripped several hundred square feet of roof from the building last year as well as tearing away all the canvas over our loading dock area. Emergency repairs done right after the storm closed the roof but another, more detailed repair, was required to suppress significant roof leakage we were seeing in heavy rains. We’re now ready for the next big rain to see how the repairs went!

September brings the America’s Second Harvest national conference, training with the Florida Department of Agriculture, start-up of after school Kids Café sites and a host of other smaller projects so it will be a busy time even if the hurricane season stays as calm as it has so far.

Welcome!

2006-07-21T14:14:00.000-06:00

Welcome to our new web page.

This effort started last year but was derailed by Hurricane Katrina. While our Katrina relief effort continues, it is now at a manageable state and we’re able to conduct other, more routine, activities. I plan to provide a monthly update blog unless needed more often.

Today, disaster recovery along coastal Mississippi and Alabama primarily involves rebuilding as opposed to emergency food distribution. Construction workers from across the nation have descended upon the area to rebuild homes and businesses. As a result, our efforts have shifted from mass food distribution to targeted family food box distribution through a number of churches and community organizations. This effort is required because many families are strapped with the expenses related to rebuilding while still unemployed or underemployed. Insurance companies continue to battle with the people of the coast over flood versus wind related coverage which has left many with no insurance payments eight months after the storm. Rather then wait, these people are using their credit and available funds to work on their homes and in those cases a food box helps indirectly but in a significant manner. A recent food box recipient wrote us that receiving an emergency food box saved them $50 to $75 they could then spend on sheet rock to repair walls or replacement curtains for the windows. Our intent is to use funds from various grants to continue the food box program through at least the end of 2006. Our food boxes contain a variety of donated food items coming through America’s Second Harvest-The Nation’s Food Bank Network and food items purchased to round out the diet. In other words if we have donated spaghetti sauce but no noodles we purchases the noodles. This has allowed us to provide 50 pound food boxes with a wholesale value of approximately $75 (the retail value is over $90) for about $7. In other words for every $7 donated we’re able to give a family over 10 times the value in food.

We’re also staying busy getting ready for any future storms. Thanks to generous donations from across the nation to America’s Second Harvest, the network has been able to provide us with funds to deploy 20 emergency pantry units along our portion of the gulf coast as well as refrigerated trucks to move the food. The sites will be equipped with walk-in freezer units and emergency generators to power the freezers, lights and phones. The sites will serve as emergency food distribution points in any future disaster. During non-emergency times the churches and non-profit organizations where the units are located will use them for their community pantries, Kids Café programs, church events, even cooking sites for relief workers helping with rebuilding the communities of the gulf coast. Because we know where every site is and how much frozen and dry goods they can handle, we’ll be able to send food immediately after a future disaster even when phone lines and cell towers are out of operation.

Thanks to support from Share Our Strength and Kraft Foods we have also been able to expand our Kids Café program into Mississippi this summer. Staff attended training conduct by the Mississippi Department of Education in the spring in Jackson Mississippi to become familiar with Mississippi procedures and paperwork for the national Summer Lunch Program. Three locations in the Moss Point/Pascagoula area singed up to work with us in providing summer lunches to children and several will probably continue with our after school snack and nutrition education program in the fall along with new sites. Mississippi has the lowest participation rate in the nation in the summer lunch program in spite of significant poverty and the situation has only been compounded due to last summer’s storms. We hope to expand our program year by year so that more Mississippi children and families get the support they need in future years. This program matches a program we began in Alabama three years ago.

That’s it for this month!

Dave

Hurricane Season Ends, Recovery Continues

2005-12-10T11:58:00.000-06:00

Hurricane season ends, recovery continues (December, 2005) Though the 2005 hurricane season ended on November 30, increased levels of food distribution continue here at the Bay Area Food Bank. The people on the Mississippi and Alabama coasts are still struggling, and we are still working to help them with the food and supplies they need. Thankfully, immediate needs are being met now that the majority of communities have power and water services restored to all but the most severely damaged homes. Having just finished the most active hurricane season in history, it’s time to look back on the season. Last year, suffering the impact of Hurricane Ivan and seeing the other Hurricanes crisscross central Florida, Food Bank staff thought we had seen the worst. Not so, Hurricane Katrina was a worst-case scenario. But, many forget that by the time Katrina struck, a record breaking number of early storms had already been recorded. The Bay Area Food Bank staff was just completing support related to the July landfall of Hurricane Dennis which caused significant damage as it came across in Navarre Beach , and continued through portions of Santa Rosa and Escambia County , Florida . We distributed over 120,000 pounds of food through our Pace, Florida warehouse following Hurricane Dennis with the last community distribution occurring on August 20th. Then along came Katrina. Hurricane Katrina was a new challenge for the Food Bank, and the network. Coping with damage to both our facilities, the loss of use of the Gulfport Subsidiary, and the shear scope of the disaster caused the staff of 24 to take on a workload routinely handled by three times their number while also dealing with damaged homes on a personal level. Yet, the staff was able to distribute over 4 million pounds in the first 30 days following the storm, begin the rebuilding of their damaged homes and maintain a positive spirit. Hurricane season ended 90 days after Katrina’s Mississippi landfall. Weekly requirements have gradually declined from the 1 million plus pounds per week in disaster supplies to the 200,000 pounds per week range. While the 7 million pounds of food we’ve distributed has been invaluable to recovery, it remains difficult to gauge the next phase of Katrina recovery. We are still working through over 20 Mississippi organizations ensuring people have the food and supplies they need. But a new wrinkle as entered the picture. Katrina devastated the 13 Casinos on the Mississippi coast which employed members of 15 to 20% of the households in the area. Most Casinos were able to cover wages for 90 days after Katrina. And, while three Casinos will reopen before January 1st, the others will not be able to continue to pay employees and are months away from reopening. We will now see a surge in unemployment, causing additional people to need assistance in the coming months. This Christmas season is going to be very difficult for many families. Still, we consistently see evidence that America cares. Toy drives small and large, Holiday meal programs and a host of other creative efforts show America ’s concern every day. The New Year holds great promise for improvement with the arrival of building supplies, organization of volunteer construction teams, rebuilding and reopening of businesses and passage of Government recovery legislation to help with road and bridge repairs. Unlike New Orleans , the people of the Coast were able to stay close to their home, they’ve returned to whatever is left and are working hand in hand with their neighbors rebuilding communities. I am confident the support of America’s Second Harvest, The Nation’s Food Bank Network, as well as all the donations provided from across the America are going to help us maintain our support to the community until the task of rebuilding is done.For additional information contact:Shearie Archer or Anita Havel, Bay Area Food Bank – 251-653-1617 sarcher@bayareafoodbank.org or ahavel@bayareafoodbank.org

25 Days After the Storm...

2005-09-22T15:46:00.000-06:00

Hi All,

It has been 25 days since Hurricane Katrina. I figured I’d send another update on our work here along the Gulf Coast before Rita makes landfall and creates a whole new set of problems for the network.

The food bank passed the 3 million pound mark in distribution earlier this week and has an additional 1 million pounds of food inbound from the efforts of the network staff. In addition to the 132 donated loads from the network, (over 100 have already arrived), we’ve had 10 USDA disaster loads, 6 Oprah donated loads, and approximately 10 direct loads from other donors. 5 of the original 6 loaned staff members will have departed by tomorrow and we have received new staff from Oregon, San Jose, Sacramento and Colorado which is maintaining our strength. To all who have loaned staff members, thanks! They’ve each pitched in and done terrific work, sometimes nothing like what they came to do, in helping us distribute over 5 times our usual rate. We have also received 8 FEMA funded temporary employees who are being trained on various warehousing duties to help us in the long haul recovery effort.

For the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast the relief effort is largely complete and we are now in the recovery effort. That means many of the hot feeding sites are standing down, people are camped on their property or in some form of temporary shelter. The next few months will continue to require expanded food distribution because those living close to the edge financially are now waiting for financial assistance, water and power still needs to be fully restored and then commercial businesses need to restock. As a result, most of the 140 different organizations we’ve distributed to will be shifting from constant distribution to periodic mass distributions, probably on weekends, as those people in the disaster area restart jobs or assist with clean-up during the week.

Damage estimates become more and more refined every day. It appears that this storm has affected our Mississippi/west Alabama service area at approximately 3 times the level that Hurricane Ivan impacted our Florida/east Alabama service area last year. That translates to somewhere in the range of 80,000 people significantly impacted out of the coastal Mississippi population of roughly 300,000. Where New Orleans is largely a displaced persons relief effort due to flooding, our service area has much of the population in place but in vastly substandard living conditions. I can report that our two person Gulfport SDO, Twelve Baskets, amazingly escaped significant damage in spite of the buildings on either side being destroyed. The Branch manager, Jennifer Knue is back at work getting the building cleaned and waiting on the return of water and power-still weeks away. Unfortunately her assistant, Brenda Williams suffered a total loss of her home and has had to move in with one of her children’s family, an all too common situation.

I’ll close this update by saying that support from Mike and Al’s staffs has been outstanding in what has to be the biggest challenge the network has ever faced. Two examples of their effort; to get rental Reefer trucks on site to increase our direct distribution, the Chicago staff had to go all the way to Iowa before they could find available trucks. And, when I identify a particular need, such as a request for a supply of Pedialyte in case intestinal problems should develop among returnees, the staff finds the item and gets it to us. There is no doubt that the Chicago staff is clearly focused on doing their best to get us through this disaster. Doug O’Brien’s staff is helping cut, no eliminate, red tape in getting USDA food to each of us to assist with emergency distribution.

This morning the local NBC affiliate featured the food bank with a lead in that essentially said, “there is one area organization that has worked effectively since Katrina struck” and closed with a comment that the one thing not found anywhere at the Food Bank was “Red Tape.” We got the credit, but it is the entire network that can take pride in the statement.

We’ve posted some pictures on our web site www.bayareafoodbank.org for those interested.

Dave Reaney
Executive Director
Bay Area Food Bank
Theodore (Mobile) Alabama

Katrina Disaster update

2005-09-13T15:52:00.000-06:00

Hi all,

Knowing everyone is starved for information I figured I’d send something out today to let you know what terrific support we’ve been receiving and give you our perspective as the food bank on the eastern edge of Katrina- nicked by the storm but not in the main area of destruction.

In the first 48 hours after the Hurricane the Bay Area Food Bank struggled to keep the main facility viable. Our main warehouse received winds exceeding 90 MPH, suffered $75,000 to $100,000 in damage and lost commercial power. A part on our emergency generator worked loose through the night, probably due to the winds, which resulted in our 400 gallon diesel tank blowing out diesel and running dry in 12 hours instead of the usual 40 hours. While EMA/national Guard took a request for emergency fuel, the staff siphoned gas from the diesel trucks to keep the generator functioning about 50% of the time. It was 30 hours before the National Guard diesel arrived. Our SDO located in Gulfport Mississippi was in the heart of the Mississippi destruction. Although the structure survived, it will not be operational for some time due to location, lack of power and the need to clean out significant damaged product. Our Pace, Florida branch suffered minor damage for the third time, (Ivan and Dennis) but had power restored within 24 hours.

In the first several days 90% of communication with Chicago was via personal cell phone due to line outages, we were lucky to have even that. 50% of the Theodore staff suffered damage to their homes and all but one lost power for times ranging from three to seven days. Yet, all were at work for the first four days after the Hurricane before we could start letting individuals take a day to clean-up their house and find gas. Today all have power, some have tarps on their roofs awaiting repair and FEMA has started picking up the mounds of debris along every curb in town.

Our 21 county service area includes the eight southern-most counties in Mississippi, all of Coastal Alabama and the four western Counties in the Florida Panhandle (struck by Hurricane Dennis in July and Ivan last September). Calls to our 80 plus Mississippi agencies in the first week after the Hurricane yielded no response. Even today we have had direct contact with only 3 agencies. As a result we distribute based on word of mouth from Sheriff Departments, EMA centers, Red Cross and any other source of information we can find.

In the first ten days since the Hurricane, the Bay Area Food Bank has distributed approximately 1.5 million pounds of food in Mississippi and southern Alabama. Our branch facility in the Pensacola Florida area has started supporting four church shelters set up to feed and house displaced persons, mostly from Mississippi.
Checking this morning, the Chicago office has over 50 loads on our arrived or inbound list totaling over 2 million pounds of food and disaster relief products. The USDA has provided 6 emergency loads, most arriving today, while we’ve received two diverted Red Cross loads (UHT Milk and Frozen Chicken). We were also allocated 6 or 7 loads from the Oprah donation. I can not easily count the loads

We currently have 6 Food Bank staff and two trucks assisting us. Ft Myers has sent a Reefer and warehouse worker (Andrew). Waterloo, Iowa has sent a Driver, Jeff (handling the Fort Myers truck). Kansas City has sent a truck and driver, Rusty. Columbia Georgia has sent a Driver, David. New York City has sent a volunteer coordinator, Ray. And, Concord, CA has sent an operation’s Manager, Steve.

Daysprings Baptist church, located about six miles from the warehouse, has hundreds of volunteers sorting food and making food boxes with loaned equipment. They are making up over 1,000 boxes per day and load them into smaller truck/trailer loads going to rural communities or neighborhoods- 60,000 pounds yesterday alone. Trucks are diverted to them for box production while the warehouse handles pallet level distribution with our trucks and a number of large trucks in the area from a wide assortment of disaster relief organizations and churches.

Knowing that our Mississippi and Alabama service area is only part of the area impacted area should give you and indication of the scope of this operation when you add the other partners involved in this effort. I receive calls from Mike Halligan, Al Brislain, Dan LaBonte, as well as Mark, Stephanie or Mitzi daily to see if there is anything additional we need and check on how things are going. Ertharin contacts me periodic for a “sanity check” as well. We also received a much appreciated immediate $25,000 grant to help with the immediate upsurge in activity/costs we’ve experienced and will experience in the coming weeks.

The national staff is also working to determine the long range needs we’ll have as the 1st phase of relief dies down and we move into supporting agencies trying to restart after their repairs are complete and handle vastly increased numbers of requests for support. To put this in perspective, only about 60% of our west Florida agencies have returned to helping the community since Hurricane Ivan struck 12 months ago next week. At the same time, distribution in west Florida since last September has increased 50% to meet the needs. I expect a similar situation over the next year with our Mississippi service area and with need in our Alabama and Florida service area related to displaced persons.

Thanks to all for the support and offers of support. It is truly appreciated. You can track our daily progress and find some pictures on our web site www.bayareafoodbank.org

Our media contacts working to keep people informed are Shearie Archer sarcher@secondharvest.org and Anita Havel ahavel@secondharvest.org