The Clark County Food Bank capped off years of planning and fundraising in early 2012 when it opened the doors of a spacious, new, state-of-the-art warehouse and distribution center. It was a huge step forward for a key local agency that long made do with cramped and insufficient operations and storage space.
But the food bank is reaching for an even higher vision now, according to executive director Alan Hamilton: going beyond hunger.
“Beyond Hunger” is the name of a new capital campaign the food bank has announced. It’s aimed at expanding the 22,000-square-foot facility by another 4,400 square feet on its northeast corner. A cornerstone gift of $250,000 from the Firstenburg Foundation, also announced Monday, has already vaulted the agency toward its overall goal of $900,000. Construction will start this month at the food bank, 6502 N.E. 47th Ave.
The campaign is intended to help the food bank pursue the tougher part of its overall mission: not just feeding the hungry but alleviating the root causes of hunger, Hamilton said. To that end, the new building already includes a well-appointed teaching kitchen where cooking and nutrition classes are held. According to its latest annual report, the food bank touched nearly 1,100 nutrition students and offered dozens of courses and workshops in that kitchen and at other sites, including schools and nonprofit agencies such as Boys & Girls Clubs, in 2014.
Those wise-ranging classes include everything you need to know about healthy shopping and healthy cooking, Hamilton said, and are aimed at making “permanent life changes” for food bank clients who need to reprogram what they eat, how they get it and how they prepare it.
“This isn’t just providing the day’s resources,” Hamilton said. “This is helping to solve the problem.”
But office space for staff and crucial volunteers in the building has already turned out to be far too small, Hamilton said. The food bank is getting ready to welcome, later this year, an expanded team of Americorps volunteers — five in all — who will teach a lot of the nutrition and cooking lessons; they, too, need space to meet, plan and prepare, he said.
“We have all these young leaders who are wanting to give a year or more of their lives to eradicating this problem,” Hamilton said. “We want to put them to the best possible use.”
The food bank wants to undertake a sophisticated demographic mapping project, he said, to determine who is really being reached and who’s being missed by the existing network of food pantries in Clark County.
It’s the kind of project that will take some space and some dollars to execute, Hamilton said. He plans to involve sister nonprofit agencies that work in overlapping fields — housing, health care, education — and host large-scale meetings where all those groups can put their heads together over maps showing unfilled need, he said.
Hamilton said all this comes in the wake of several years of astonishingly fast food bank growth. “The feeding-people-today part of our mission has grown from about 3.5 million pounds, prior to this site, to a little over 6 million in a year,” he sad. “That’s substantially faster than anybody expected.”
