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Ways to End Hunger |
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Mobile food pantries
Historically, the only kinds of organizations that have been able to participate in charity food distribution efforts have been those small number of groups who:
- Have a building, and
- That building is located where the need is, and
- That building’s layout will support a food pantry, and
- Have enough extra space in that building to accommodate food handling.
These limitations exclude up to 80 percent of all eligible churches and other nonprofit organizations from direct participation in charity food distribution efforts.
For example, a church might have a building but the building might be located in a wealthy part of town where having a pantry makes no sense. Or they might have a building but it might have no space to house a pantry. Or they might have a space but it might be on the seventh floor of an office building, or otherwise not be a reasonable space for housing a food pantry.
Add on to these limitations the myriad of nonprofit groups that don’t have buildings and what you find is that we have been trying to fight hunger with both hands tied behind our backs!
In many communities the need for a building so constricts the pool of available players as to push ending hunger hopelessly out of reach.
Solution: Use beverage trucks as mobile food pantries
In 1998 it dawned on our food bank that beverage delivery trucks—the trucks with pallet-size bays up and down their sides—could be used as mobile food pantries, eliminating the need for groups to have a building in order to be able to distribute food. If they could borrow a parking lot for a couple of hours, they could become and active player in the struggle to end hunger.
We now own four such trucks and dispense more than 500,000 lbs. of food from them per month at locations scattered all over the nine-county area served by our main warehouse.
The program we run is very simple:
A church or nonprofit group that wants to begin hosting mobile pantry distributions signs up to use our mobile distribution services and then schedules with our mobile food pantry manager the dates, times and places where they would like to host distributions.
- Once the host agency has scheduled with us, they can then recruit a dozen or so volunteers to work for about three hours and can begin their outreach efforts to notify the people they hope to serve of when and where the distributions will take place. Then on that day, we load one of our mobile pantry trucks with food and drive it to the site.
- The host agency sets up tables around the truck and their volunteers load the tables from the truck. The scene ends up looking like a little farmer’s market. Clients a walk around the truck helping themselves to the goods they can use. Most people take between 25-50 pounds of goods, which is all that the average person can carry. When they are done, the agency loads any leftovers back on the truck, and it drives away.
Mobile food pantries work!
All of my food bank’s largest user agencies are now almost exclusively mobile pantry users. The largest of them distributed 500,000 pounds from the trucks in 2003. And since late 1998, we have done 3500 distributions involving more than 22 million pounds of food working with hundreds of organizations in dozens of communities.
What the mobile units permit us to do is mobilize a much larger circle of players into supplying food to the needy, which enables us to increase the number of groups we serve, and expand our distribution into communities and neighborhoods we haven’t been able to reach before.
For more information on the mobile pantry concept, e-mail John Arnold.