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Oregon Stories of Recovery
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Article Content
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| ARRA dollars providing food at NeighborImpact |
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CSBG ARRA funds have been used partially to fund two staff positions in the Food Bank. These two positions, Program Coordinator and Operations Specialist, have performed a variety of functions within the overall program. During the period of July 1, 2009 to December 31, 2009, the Program Coordinator visited 14 partner agencies to monitor their food distributions, enrolled two new partner agencies as recipients of food from NeighborImpact, and coordinated many food drives increasing the resources available from the local community. The Operations Specialist is the direct interface with our 40 partner agencies for food distribution, working with them on their individual needs for product as well as ordering all food received 3 times per month from Oregon Food Bank. During the reporting period, over 1.1 million pounds of food passed through NeighborImpact’s inventory system, and our partner agencies provided help to an average of 14,740 individuals each month. Both of these represent increases over the same time period a year earlier and large increases over two years previously. NeighborImpact’s Food Bank is the regional Food Bank for the three counties of Central Oregon (Crooke, Deschutes, and Jefferson Counties).
By the very nature of the Food Bank Network, Community Partners are critical to success. NeighborImpact distributes food resources to 40 partner agencies located throughout the tri-county area. These partners are other non-profits and/or churches that operate food pantries, meal sites, brown bag distributions, and shelters. Between July 1, 2009 to December 31, 2009, individuals in these agencies contributed over 28,000 volunteer hours to the food distribution network. Other very important community partners are our base of local donors. These are the individuals and groups who hold food rives or donate from their own supply of food along with our local store donors.
NeighborImpact has a very robust food recovery program, picking up products 5 days per week at 11 grocery stores and 10 other food producers in the area. For the reporting period, the food recovery program received over 422,000 pounds of food from our store donors. During the same period, individuals and groups contributed over 65,500 pounds of food through food drives. The final group of local partners are the volunteers who contributed 739 hours of work to the Food Bank itself. Without these groups, NeighborImpact’s Food Bank could not continue in providing food resources to the communities of Central Oregon.
Article provided by Community Action Partnership of Oregon. See www.caporegon.org for more information.
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