Nourish Food Bank

Nourish Food Bank exists to feed families, fuel hope, and nourish our communities through compassionate service, supportive programs, and partnerships that create a network of care. We directly feed families, providing 600,000 meals in the last year, but we also work with community partners to expand our work and their capacity for service.

Nourish partners with area schools to distribute meal bags to homeless students each weekend and holiday so they have access to food when not in school (and continued to do so while schools were closed due to COVID through both schools offering meals and by directly including those meal bags in our family serves). We work with partner agencies feeding people in a variety of ways to ensure they have the ability to feed those they serve and to redistribute those critical and limited resources to other essential program areas to best serve the whole person. Partners include agencies from domestic and sexual violence programs to homeless shelters, children's homes to veterans outreach and even other food banks and pantries. We believe we are strongest when we focus on nourishing our communities, together.

Nourish Food Bank works with truck drivers and companies across the region to accept food that would otherwise be wasted when rejected by an end user, such as a grocery store. That food can come to Nourish instead, where we distribute it directly to families in crisis as well as give it freely to partner agencies to aid in their hunger relief efforts. We also work with local farmers and farmers markets, grocery stores, and local groups, schools, companies and churches holding food drives on our behalf. Additionally, we accept foods through the USDA TEFAP commodities program. These efforts allow us to bring in as much donated food as possible to distribute to those in crisis and our partners without charging for any of it ever. We also have worked to bring multiple agencies under one roof to create a one-stop-shop for multiple services for clients in need and to create a shared resource and referral network to strengthen our community. Onsite partners include Community Helpers, Junior Achievement, Dominion Financial Management, Endure Athletics, and True You TN.

Nourish has increased to multiple sites, serving over half a million meals per year to families in crisis, while also supporting our other community partners. We are currently working on establishing delivery and drive up models as well as satellite locations homed in partner sites across the region. This will allow us to increase our capacity for service to one million meals annually within the next three years. By reducing hunger, creating essential agency linkages and referrals, and helping families to keep more money in their pockets to save and use toward moving out of poverty, we will help thousands of families achieve sustainability and to thrive.