FOOD for Lane County

Our Strategic Plan for 2021-2023 includes the following framing pillars:
1. Sustainable Funding and Food Supply
2. Access and Equity
3. Agility and Resilience
4. Community Impact

Goals for each pillar are:

Sustainable Funding and Food Supply:
• Build sustainable sources of funding to support ongoing operations and new program development.
• Diversify funding sources to reduce risk.
• Complete Capital funding campaign to drive future expansion.
• Build strong food supplies through donations, purchase, gardens and the cultivation of new and existing partnerships.
• Continue to diversify food options to meet cultural desires of various populations.
• Capitalize on existing and emerging funding opportunities from pandemic and other community impacts.

Access and Equity:
• Ensure that the most vulnerable populations have access to food.
• Build strong partnerships with organizations that serve vulnerable populations to deliver access.
• Build strong capacity to meet community food needs through partnerships, volunteers and employees.
• Train and educate staff on DEI and ensure DEI best practices are being adopted.

Agility and Resilience:
• Employees are FFLC. Ensure there is high employee engagement and morale.
• Build flexible staffing/volunteer models that support staff through emergency and peak demand times.
• Leverage data as a part of leadership.
• Use data to drive efficiency, enhance access, and enhance cultural sensitivities.
• Adopt agile planning methodologies within the Board and Management that allow FFLC to iterate and pivot through highly unpredictable times.
• Establish expansion plans that address staffing, programs, and partnerships to deliver results.

Community Impact:
• Drive community impact by reducing hunger in Lane County—and be able to demonstrate those results
• Collect meaningful data to drive insights that inform priorities for impact. We can’t do everything; so how do we choose the highest and best use of our resources
Measure community impact and understand effects on regions and people. Incorporate an equity lens in analytic analyses and decision making.
• Redouble efforts to gather and leverage data, exploring:
- What are the trends and predictors of new needs or progress made?
- How do we understand the complexities that give rise to hunger?
- How are our programs helping?
- What are the developmental milestones for making lasting changes that break cycles of poverty and oppression?

Sustainable Funding and Food Supply
1: Food Supply: Explore and develop opportunities to ensure that FOOD for Lane County—and by extension its partners—has an adequate, varied and sustainable food supply.
2: Sustainable Funding: Building on FFLC’s foundation of strong community support, momentum from the capital campaign, and engagement of new supporters (prompted by COVID-19), we plan to design and implement an innovative Development Operating Plan to guide the work of generating sustainable funding for the continual growth, creation or redesign of programs by engaging the community to create access to food.

Access and Equity
1: Equity Planning and Implementation: Complete the development of a comprehensive organizational equity plan and strategy, and incorporate and integrate equity considerations in all aspects of organizational life.
2: Food Distribution: Develop an improved equity-oriented model for working with partner agencies, moving beyond ‘monitoring for compliance’ to ‘collaborating for community impact.’

Agility and Resilience
1: Capital Campaign: Complete the $9.0 million capital campaign fundraising effort; plan and complete the Bailey Hill building renovation [$2.5 million].
2: Staff and Organizational Systems and Culture: Improve organizational systems for staff development, workload management, and organizational culture.

Community Impact
1: Program Development: Develop programs that increase access to food and programs that use food to help address the root causes of hunger and food insecurity
2: Data Systems: FFLC needs to be able to effectively use data to inform internal decision-making regarding funding, programs, and food distribution; to tell the story of the work we and our partner agencies do; and to understand the experience of partner agencies and our end users about whether food assistance provided by FFLC is available, accessible and meets their needs.

FFLC has been feeding those who are in need of food for 33 years. Our programs and services accomplished the following during fiscal year 2018-19: Distributed 5,629,379 pounds of food to 31 pantries in our Food Distribution Network, which provided 72,694 Emergency Food Boxes; served approximately 76,983 hot meals to children this summer at 48 sites through the Summer Food Program; rescued, prepared and packaged a record amount of food—more than a million pounds—through our Food Rescue Express (FREX) program; In 2018 our Gardens Program grew and harvested over 180,000 pounds of fresh, organic produce from FFLC's two educational gardens. In FY 18-19, we delivered over 5,700 Weekend Snack Packs to elementary school-aged children in need; the Extra Helping program provided 1,310 low-income households access to fresh produce and dairy items; we distributed 445,548 pounds of fruits and vegetables through the Trillium Produce Plus Program and served hot meals to 2,632 people through our Dining Room Program.
FFLC programs and partnerships respond to the immediate crisis of hunger while other programs help individuals and families address chronic food insecurity through self-sufficiency and education programs. The majority of the food we distribute is given to clients at our partner agencies through our Emergency Food Box Program. The eligibility criteria for this program are: household income at or below 185% of the federal poverty level or currently participating in the Food Stamp Program (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Social Security Income (SSI) or Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIEAP).
As the second largest food bank in Oregon, FFLC is a member of the Oregon Food Bank Network, United Way of Lane County and a distribution partner of Feeding America, the national food bank network.

FOOD for Lane County has successfully met the food needs for the emergency food system for over 30 years. We have adapted and responded to changes in community demographics by expanding outreach to multicultural populations, seniors, and children. We have responded to changes in food supply by creating produce-only programs and sourcing and growing our own food. Nutrition education offers participants a chance to learn to use the food they get from a food program, and gardening education teaches participants to grow their own food. We have recently developed a job training program that provides short-term vocational training to help people with skills that lead to jobs that create self-sufficiency. We have purchased a new warehouse space to add to our current space, which will be ready for our use in the fall of 2019.