Reduce Waste and Humiliation—Let Clients Assemble Their Own Food Boxes
Let’s summarize the impact that the Waste Not Want Not Project recommendations can have if employed by your food pantry:
- You learned how to drop the cost of ending hunger by getting people to give you money instead of food purchased at retail prices.
- You learned how to get 20 times more food per dollar spent by drawing food from your area’s food bank or food rescue organization.
These two changes increase your community’s capacity to end hunger by approximately 26.6 times that of the more traditional food drive.
Add in a 50 percent reduction in waste achieved by your letting clients pick out their own food, and guess what? You will have increased your community’s capacity to address its hunger problem by 53 times what the other system did or ever could do! That is, without drawing a single additional new dollar into the hunger-relief effort, you will have increased the impact of the dollars already being devoted to hunger relief by up to 53 times what those same dollars could or would have achieved if you had continued using them in the old ways.
How big is that? Can you imagine having 50 times more food or money than your pantry currently has? What would that do to your ability to let people get as much help as they need whenever they need it?
Various “Client Choice” Charity Food Distribution Models
If the space available for your food pantry won’t gracefully accommodate a client shopping system, or if your organization can’t or won’t go to full client-shopping all at once, there are some options available to you.
Fixed Menu Plus “Grab Bag” Options
Your pantry distributes its traditional fixed, standardized food box, but then also displays varieties of additional items from the pantry, permitting clients to take limited amounts—for example, one bag, one item per household member, six items—or unlimited amounts of those goods. Fresh produce, bread and baked goods or any “odds and ends” which find their way into the pantry are excellent candidates for such distribution.
Fixed Menu Bags for Emergencies (House Burned Down Last Night) Client- Selected Assortments for Others
Your pantry maintains a supply of fixed menu bags for those few clients who have no food in the house and so must be supplied with everything needed for balanced meals until the crisis passes. All other clients—those who need supplemental assistance—are permitted to select assortments of goods drawn from the pantry without any pretext of those goods meeting all their nutritional needs.
Food Pyramid Food Bank Assortment
Your pantry attempts to draw and stock some items from each part of the food pyramid and displays those goods, permitting clients to take as much of those goods, figuring a little over a pound per person per meal, it will take to meet their needs. The Community Action House in Holland, Mich., has color-coded shelving that aids clients in their selecting what food to take.
Clients Browse From a List of Available Goods
Your pantry acquires the best variety of food it can from your local food bank and itemizes what is available on a list provided clients as they arrive to pick up food. Clients use the list to indicate the items they want, and the pantry staff assembles their box from that list.
The possibilities are endless. The key is to bring clients into the decision-making process so that their preferences and needs can be addressed better than could have been possible any other way.
If you can’t get a pantry to offer choices, at least see if you can coax them into setting up a swap table where clients can exchange things from their standardized food box. Even that very limited amount of being able to make choices is better than having no opportunities for making choices at all.
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