Programs and results
What we aim to solve
FOOD For Lane County is a nonprofit food bank dedicated to reducing hunger by engaging our community to create access to food. We accomplish this by soliciting, collecting, rescuing, growing, preparing and packaging food for distribution to a network of social service agencies and programs, and through public awareness, education and community advocacy. Making food easily available to the people who need it is at the core of our commitment to serve. FFLC serves the emergency food needs for the 382,000 people living in Lane County, Oregon. The 8.6 million pounds of food distributed last year resulted in five million meals for those in need. Our programs help low-income individuals and families obtain nutritious food when they cannot afford to buy it. FFLC is widely recognized for both developing creative solutions to alleviate hunger and for supporting the empowerment of clients, partners and large numbers of community volunteers in the development and promotion of self-sufficiency.
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Food Distribution Network
Making food easily available to the people who need it is at the core of FOOD for Lane County’s commitment to serve. Donated food is distributed through emergency food pantries, meal sites, shelters, and non-emergency programs. This countywide network of providers, many of them volunteers, are on the front lines and stand between families in need and severe hunger.
Family Dinner Program
FOOD for Lane County operates The Dining Room, a meal site in downtown Eugene. The Dining Room provides free hot dinners four nights a week. In addition to offering meals, this innovative restaurant serves large portions of dignity in a community-oriented atmosphere.
Gardens
FOOD for Lane County’s three gardens--- the GrassRoots Garden, the Youth Farm and Churchill Community Garden---provide on-site gardening opportunities and workshops, while growing fresh, organic produce for distribution through the FOOD for Lane County Network. County residents may also access fresh produce by purchasing it at the youth-run farm stand and through a community-supported agriculture program.
Summer Food Program
FOOD for Lane County operates the largest Summer Food Program in Oregon, which provides nutritious meals five days a week to children during the months when the National School Lunch Program is not in session. Staff and volunteers serve meals at schools, parks and community centers located throughout Lane County during the summer months.
Meals on Wheels
Meals on Wheels is more than just a meal! Friendly volunteers deliver a nourishing, freshly prepared noontime meal that is nutritionally balanced to provide one-third of a senior’s recommended daily nutrients. Volunteers have time for a brief chat and a safety check. Seniors who live alone feel more secure knowing that someone is checking on them regularly.
Nutrition Education
In addition to partnering with Oregon State University/Lane County Extension to provide samples and nutritious recipes at food pantries, FOOD for Lane County offer nutrition education through cooking classes, grocery store tours, and outreach events. Nutrition program volunteers demonstrate how to prepare healthy, low-cost meals.
Extra Helping
Extra Helping prevents hunger by providing a weekly serving of bread and produce for residents in low-income housing complexes. Extra Helping builds community involvement and ownership by mobilizing resident volunteers to organize and administer the program.
Senior Grocery
The Senior Grocery Program is a once monthly food box (or bag) given to low-income seniors. The box is filled with nutritious staple foods necessary to a balanced diet. The program is currently serving 345 seniors.
Produce Plus
Produce Plus brings high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to people in need at community and neighborhood locations. For the recipients, the experience is similar to shopping at a farmers' market without the cost. The income eligibility is a little higher than that of receiving a food box, in recognition that people of all income brackets can struggle with food insecurity.
Mobile Pantry Program
The Mobile Pantry program focuses on serving marginalized communities and geographic areas with high need in an effort to supplement and promote other hunger-relief agencies. Through collaborations with partners and local communities, the mobile pantry will work to increase food security through an equitable, sustainable, and accessible mobile pantry model while incubating self-sufficient local solutions to hunger.
Where we work
Affiliations & memberships
Feeding America
Oregon Food Bank Network 1988
United Way of Lane County 1988
External reviews

Videos
Our results
How does this organization measure their results? It's a hard question but an important one.
Evaluation documents
Download evaluation reportsNumber of people within the organization's service area accessing food aid
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
Economically disadvantaged people
Related Program
Food Distribution Network
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Holding steady
Context Notes
This metric is the number of individuals who accessed food from the emergency food box program.
Number of meals delivered
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Population(s) Served
Seniors, Older adults
Related Program
Meals on Wheels
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Holding steady
Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
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?
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
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.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
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.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
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.
How we listen
Seeking feedback from people served makes programs more responsive and effective. Here’s how this organization is listening.
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Who are the people you serve with your mission?
All Lane County residents that meet the income guidelines for receiving emergency food established by the USDA can receive a food box regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or background. Increasing access to emergency food for diverse populations is an important aspect of the Emergency Food Box Program. We strive to provide culturally appropriate foods to the demographically diverse populations that comprise Lane County.
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How is your organization collecting feedback from the people you serve?
Electronic surveys (by email, tablet, etc.), Paper surveys, Focus groups or interviews (by phone or in person), Case management notes, Community meetings/Town halls, Constituent (client or resident, etc.) advisory committees, Suggestion box/email,
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How is your organization using feedback from the people you serve?
To identify and remedy poor client service experiences, To identify bright spots and enhance positive service experiences, To make fundamental changes to our programs and/or operations, To inform the development of new programs/projects, To identify where we are less inclusive or equitable across demographic groups, To strengthen relationships with the people we serve, To understand people's needs and how we can help them achieve their goals,
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What significant change resulted from feedback?
We stopped collecting ethnicity data from emergency food box clients in 2019 as a result of feedback from clients. In 2017, we launched the warehouse Job Training Program because in the 2015 county-wide Hunger Factors Survey, many people said unemployment was the number one barrier to no longer needing emergency food assistance.
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With whom is the organization sharing feedback?
The people we serve, Our staff, Our board, Our funders, Our community partners,
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How has asking for feedback from the people you serve changed your relationship?
In January 2019 we launched a Participant Advisory Council (a consumer council) that met every month from January to June in 2019. We recruited 12 participants from diverse backgrounds who participate in various programs. The purpose was to receive more in-depth feedback on FFLC programming in order to potentially make needed updates or program changes. We started with a new group in January 2020. The council had to suspend meetings due to COVID-19 regulations in place in March and resumed meetings in June 2020 via Zoom. One of the main needs identified by the 2020 group was Culturally Appropriate Food. As a result we sought and received funding for the purchase of Culturally Appropriate Food and were able to distribute it to BIPOC through several of our agencies during 2020 and 2021.
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Which of the following feedback practices does your organization routinely carry out?
We take steps to get feedback from marginalized or under-represented people, We aim to collect feedback from as many people we serve as possible, We look for patterns in feedback based on people’s interactions with us (e.g., site, frequency of service, etc.), We engage the people who provide feedback in looking for ways we can improve in response, We act on the feedback we receive,
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What challenges does the organization face when collecting feedback?
The people we serve tell us they find data collection burdensome, It is difficult to find the ongoing funding to support feedback collection, Staff find it hard to prioritize feedback collection and review due to lack of time,
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
FOOD for Lane County
Board of directorsas of 02/08/2022
Diana Bray
CW Walker & Associates
Term: 2021 - 2022
Diana Bray
C.W. Walker Commercial Real Estate
Charles Stanton
Stanton Vineyard
Jossi Stokes
Pearly Whites of Eugene
Benj Epstein
Epstein & Associates
Justin King
King Estate Winery
Rachel Ulrich
RU Talking Consultants
Tiffany Mellow
Perkins and Company, PC
Katharine Ryan
PacificSource Community Solutions
Keri Garcia
Moss Adams
Laurie Hauber
University of Oregon School of Law
Chris Hemmings
Summit Bank
Weston McClain
Three Willows Ranch
Samantha Snyder
PakTech
Sarah Stapleton
University of Oregon College of Education
Michelle Thurston
FFLC Client
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Yes -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? Yes -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Yes -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? Yes
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? GuideStar partnered on this section with CHANGE Philanthropy and Equity in the Center.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
Race & ethnicity
No data
Gender identity
No data
No data
Sexual orientation
No data
Disability
No data
Equity strategies
Last updated: 09/29/2021GuideStar partnered with Equity in the Center - an organization that works to shift mindsets, practices, and systems to increase racial equity - to create this section. Learn more
- We disaggregate data to adjust programming goals to keep pace with changing needs of the communities we support.
- We employ non-traditional ways of gathering feedback on programs and trainings, which may include interviews, roundtables, and external reviews with/by community stakeholders.
- We have long-term strategic plans and measurable goals for creating a culture such that one’s race identity has no influence on how they fare within the organization.
- We seek individuals from various race backgrounds for board and executive director/CEO positions within our organization.
- We have community representation at the board level, either on the board itself or through a community advisory board.
- We help senior leadership understand how to be inclusive leaders with learning approaches that emphasize reflection, iteration, and adaptability.