Merrimack Valley Food Bank, Inc.

The Mobile Pantry program is a home grocery delivery service serving homebound, low-income seniors and people with disabilities in Greater Lowell. Volunteers deliver nutritious supplemental foods once a month to help prevent food insecurity and help clients maintain a better quality of life. Bags include approximately 35 pounds of food, including fresh produce, frozen meats, dairy products, canned goods, and shelf stable items tailored to the client’s dietary needs and preferences. Whenever possible, the same volunteer delivers the food each month to provide a familiar social interaction for the homebound client. Additional bags are delivered for holidays.

The Operation Nourish program provides healthy food for students to enjoy when they are away from school on weekends and vacations and are not able to access school breakfast and lunch. The program serves more than 2,900 students per month during the school year. What began in 2011 as a pilot program in one elementary school now serves every Lowell Public School as well as the Lowell Community Charter School, Greater Lowell Technical High School, and Greater Lawrence Technical High School. Depending on the needs of the school, some schools receive pre-packed bags of food for selected students to take home, and others have a small in-school food pantry stocked by MVFB. The program provides students with the fuel they need to learn, grow, and play.

MVFB's Community Market is a free farmers' market-style program, providing fresh produce and other food staples at six low-income and senior housing properties in Greater Lowell. The markets occur at each location once a month from June-November. Operating the markets right where people live improves access to nutritious options.

The Summer Lunch program partners with the USDA Summer Eats program to provide lunches and snacks to children participating in summer activities in Lowell. Food insecurity increases when children are out of school, and this program closes that gap for families, providing a nutritious meal at a time when it is greatly needed. Last summer the program provided more than 8,700 lunches and snacks during July and August.

The Food Rescue program picks up perishable and packaged foods from supermarkets three days a week and distributes them to our member agencies. These are foods that would otherwise be discarded due to overstocking, approaching expiration dates, or being "ugly" produce, but they are all within date and healthy to consume. This program saves 35-75,000 pounds of food from landfills each year.