Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, Inc.

Our mission is to feed the hungry in Baton Rouge and the surrounding parishes by providing food and educational outreach through faith-based and other community partners. With community support, we have served the hungry in our 11 parish service area for more than 35 years. We believe no one should go hungry. There are a myriad of reasons why someone needs the services of a Food Bank. Some are socioeconomic in nature, and there is a time to address those. But first, we feed our fellow man. We believe that we should provide basic necessities so that our clients can focus on more compelling issues, such as completing an education or getting job. Our long-term goal is to shorten our lines so that one day our clients become self-sufficient and no longer need the services of a Food Bank. We believe our work provides hope for the future, providing dignity to all those we serve.

Strategies to help our clients achieve self-sufficiency include our model of food distribution through member agencies rather than direct distribution through our main warehouse. The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank procures, processes, and distributes more than 13 million pounds of food through 115 member agencies, which distribute directly to the clients in need. This method of distribution allows our agencies to develop a rapport with our clients and deliver the educational outreach portion of our mission, which will ultimately enable them to become self-sufficient. A distribution center that handles 13 million pounds of food cannot have the one-on-one relationship needed with each client that is needed to turn a life around. A member agency seeing a fraction of clients for their monthly distribution has a captive audience to educate, empower, and thus enable our clients to become all that they can be. This strategy has worked well for us, with a biannual meeting of our agencies to "train the trainer" to keep everyone on track. Success stories abound. Former clients have become donors to help others as they were once helped in their time of need. Others have become the heads of some of our member agencies.

The Food Bank has trained staff in place in Agency Relations, Development, and all levels of Administration and is thoroughly committed to improving the lives of those we serve. We recently added a Program Coordinator to work with in Agency Relations and run our special programs. Our SNAP Coordinator also works with our member agencies in addition to her duties in the field helping clients with the SNAP program sign-up. This team approach has proven effective in working with our member agencies, which are staffed by both paid staff and volunteers. Many of our agencies have staff and volunteers with a long history with the organization they serve and are quite knowledgeable and passionate about their role in feeding the hungry. The Food Bank hosts biannual Agency Relations Training Meetings, which are mandatory for the agency to remain in good standing. These meetings give agency representatives a wealth of information on nutrition and many other topics that are invaluable to our clients. Together with our agencies and our many kind donors, we are giving our clients as many tools as possible to succeed, in addition to the life-sustaining food.

The Food Bank is happy to report that our Bulk Re-Packaging Room, which was fully operational for donated product before the flood, is being rebuilt and will once again be operational and in service this year. We are the only fully automated bulk repackaging facility used by a food bank. Manual repack is in use by many food banks, which is what our food bank was employing prior to our new facility. Thanks to the generosity of two very kind donors, we have been gifted the amazing automated repackaging equipment. With FDA approval, through DHH, we will be able to repackage non-donated product. This is possibly another source of acquiring food product for our Food Bank as well as a potential source of income if we repackage food for others to sell. Many companies have express interest in our packaging Room, including our local food incubators. We continue to move forward with expanding our programs to reach more hungry people, including expanding BackPack into out-lying parishes, launching our FarmFresh program, and improving our organization's operational efficiencies. Our goal is always getting more food to those truly in need in the quickest and most efficient manner. With the understanding that there are still many food deserts with little access to grocery stores or even our member agencies, the Food Bank has begun a pilot program of Mobile Distributions, whereby our trucks will take go out into the rural areas with limited access and bring food to clients in need. Access to healthy food is one of the barriers for many clients, and the Food Bank is working hard to address access issues of all types for our clients.