Make Food Aid Accessible

Ways to End Hunger

Make Food Aid Accessible

The entire effort to reduce or eliminate hunger fails if the needy lack reasonable access to food aid.

“Reasonable access” means:

There are enough agencies distributing food to handle the volume of food needed. (More information on how to estimate a community's food need. More information on how to estimate distribution capacity required to meet the need.)
That these agencies are geographically distributed so that no rural needy person is more than 10 miles from a food aid source and no urban needy person is more than 8 to 10 blocks from such aid.
That people who may be in trouble and seeking food aid for the first time can readily find those agencies.
That agencies are open enough hours so that people who need help have a realistic chance of getting it, even if their work or other schedule is not particularly flexible.

Publicize Your Food Pantry

Make sure that people can find your food aid program:

Make certain that everyone in your parent organization—for example, your congregation’s members and staff—knows about the program.
Make certain that your community’s information and referral system has current, accurate information about your services and hours of operation.
Make certain that your county’s public welfare, Social Security, unemployment and public health and safety offices know about you.
Send a letter or brochure with information on your services to every public school, church, synagogue and mosque in the area you serve.
Make sure your area’s legislators know about you—their constituent services staff do a lot of information and referral work.
Take advantage of opportunities for publicity in your local media.

Contact the Media

People should do their charitable acts in secret, but food pantries need publicity. So, if your distribution passes a milestone, publicize it to the media. Milestones can include the number of years open, the number of families helped or the pounds of food handled. Publicize your achievements, such as “families seeking help increase 25 percent;” or a noteworthy experience, like “former client returns to head pantry,” or “Boy Scout builds shelving to help area’s needy.”

This isn’t bragging. It increases the likelihood that people who need to find you will be able to.

Events or updates can also be publicized on National Hunger Awareness Day—the first Thursday in June each year—or on World Food Day, which is October 16.

Operating Hours

Historically, many food programs have been open when it was the most convenient for their volunteers. While you have to respect volunteers’ needs, the whole point of these programs is to serve the needy.

Many of the needy are working people or are families with children or ailing family members who need care. They can’t always juggle those other responsibilities as well as they might want to in order to be able to get to the pantry when it is the most convenient for the volunteers who are staffing it.

So try your best to have your pantry open at least once a week:

in the morning,
in the afternoon,
in the evening and
on the weekend.

This gives your clients some real options in being able to access the help they need.

You can’t end hunger if the needy can’t get the food!

In the early 1990s when these accessibility revelations first dawned on us, we got out a state highway map and drew little circles around the names of towns that had charity food pantries. What we found was that less than half the communities in our service area had such services, and that in a depressingly large number of cases the nearest food aid access was 30-50 miles away from the needy. In our bigger cities we did the same sort of location plotting on a city map, and again found large areas without food aid services. You can’t end hunger if the needy can’t get the food!

Ways to End Hunger