River Bend Food Reservoir

Throughout the school year, River Bend Food Bank partners with schools and nonprofit afterschool programs to give at-risk kids food to take home for the weekend. Each week, partner sites receive individually packed grocery bags that contain at least 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, and 2 dinners that a child can prepare without adult supervision. To respect the privacy and dignity of each child, school or program staff discretely place a bag of food into the child’s backpack each Friday. This food sustains them until they get another hot meal at school on Monday morning. For some of the 3,000 children who receive these bags each week, the backpack food provides their only nourishment between school meals.

In coordination with local schools, River Bend Food Bank operates school food pantries – safe places within a local high-need school where its students and their families can receive food items when they pick up their child or attend a school function. School administrators select qualified families. The program’s goal is to offset food insecurity for children at a critical point in their development and stabilize their families while making it convenient to pick up food.

Sadly, seniors have become a fast-growing population of chronically hungry people in eastern Iowa and western Illinois; often they will not reach out for help. The Senior Hunger Initiative begins at the warehouse with “packing parties” at which volunteers assemble boxes with fresh produce for delivery to seniors in low-income elderly housing complexes. Vans deliver the boxes filled with items such as cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, and oranges. River Bend Food Bank or community volunteers unload the food and help the residents get the boxes to their apartments.

Food pantries at senior communities that do not receive deliveries provide a larger assortment of food than offered through the Senior Hunger Initiative. Volunteers (often seniors who live at the pantry site) come to the Food Bank to pick up food and then stock, organize, and distribute the food to their eligible neighbors. While seniors could take the bus to a nearby pantry, age and disabilities mean that many cannot ride the bus or easily carry on to a bus the large amount of food that we give them. The pandemic and its disproportionately negative impact on seniors leave many of them fearful of leaving their homes to attend a food pantry. Having the food pantry in their community makes it more convenient – and safer – for them to stock up on needed food items.

Approximately 150 times each year, River Bend Food Bank Mobile Food Pantries stop at designated locations throughout eastern Iowa and western Illinois to serve people in the areas of greatest need. In about two hours, each Mobile Food Pantry dispenses around 10,000 meals, enough to feed hundreds of individuals.