The Food Bank of Delaware’s new mobile pantry is getting a financial boost.
The service, which uses a 30-foot truck to bring fresh and nutritious foods to communities in need, received $50,000 thousand dollars from Bank of America Wednesday.
The funds will help build the program which has already distributed nearly 150,000 pounds of food to almost 1,500 households in 79 stops around the First State since its March launch.
[caption id="attachment_47428" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Bank of America donated $50,000 to the Food Bank of Delaware's mobile pantry service."]
“Forty-four percent of the people that we feed are children and a lot of them are dependent on adults for transportation. We know that we’re feeding a lot of children secondarily when we make this food available to adults,” said Food Bank of Delaware president and CEO, Patricia Beebe.
“When you think about the need we have within the community, it’s just the right thing to do,” says Delaware marketing president for Bank of America, Chip Rossi. “It’s a cause that anyone can rally behind when you think about the fact that people are in need of food in order to provide for their families.”
The Food Bank's mobile pantry program also provides sessions on nutrition and healthcare before food is distributed and offers financial literacy education to those utilizing the services.
“It’s a way to educate and inform people that we are feeding,” Beebe says. “We need to be informing people about how to make healthy food choices, how to eat right. This is a perfect vehicle for being able to do that. It enables us to get into areas where we wouldn’t be ordinarily.
[caption id="attachment_47426" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Bank of America volunteers help prepare food to be distributed." ]
Volunteers from Bank of America gathered at the Northeast State Services Center in Wilmington Wednesday to help the Food Bank distribute the food to 35 area families and to assist with the education session.
“The way we think about a healthy community is not only is it the basic critical needs that need to be provided, but these folks also need to have employment opportunities and they also have to have financial literacy, to ensure the fact that there are tools that they can have in order to improve their quality of life on a daily basis that will hopefully allow for them to avoid this need in the future.” said Rossi.
The 30 foot mobile pantry unit uses both dry and cold storage to keep foods fresh, and an awning provides shade for the participants to walk through and decide which foods would best help their families. Each household is permitted 50 pounds of food, which is then weighed and boxed up for the families to take back home.
“One of the problems in food distribution,” says Beebe, “is you give people something from the major food groups but it may be something they don’t like. This way, they pick what they like. They go through with a shopping cart and pick what they want. The volunteers will be helping them make selections and then its weighed and then they take it to their car.”
[caption id="attachment_47425" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Bank of America provided education on financial literacy as part of the mobile pantry program." ]
Although getting people food they need is the primary goal, the mobile pantry’s emphasis on educating people who struggle to feed their families is to eventually help them become more self-sufficient.
“One in four Delawareans needs to rely on a secondary food source to eat,” Beebe noted. “What we are all trying to do is put ourselves out of business. That is our approach and that is our philosophy. And Bank of America understands that. They want to look at long term solutions to problems and not temporary fixes.”
“To partner with Bank of America makes a lot of sense,” Beebe added. “Because why do people end up needing food assistance? Because they don’t have marketable job skills, they don’t know how to budget, they don’t know how to shop wisely. There are a lot of things that we can help people with as a way of helping the community.”
