At the Food Bank, our Community Health & Engagement (CH&E) team regularly goes out into the community to hold cooking classes at Partner Agency sites. These are great opportunities to introduce new foods to people’s diets and help give them easy, quick, and low-cost recipes using healthful foods like whole grains, fresh produce, low fat [...]
A top priority for the Food Bank is to close gaps via direct distributions in the community to get the right food to people at the right time, especially in rural areas or during times of disaster. One way to do this is with Pop Up Markets across our service area, essentially setting up distributions [...]
It's the last week of school for Maureen Joy Charter school in Durham. The school’s Executive Director Mark Bailey sits in a Kindergarten classroom preparing to distribute boxes of non-perishable food and produce to families of those children. Maureen Joy partnered with Durham Children’s Initiative and the Food Bank to provide these essentials to 200 [...]
September 11-17 is National Truck Driver Appreciation Week and the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina is taking the opportunity to celebrate our amazing fleet of drivers, dispatchers, and transportation staff. A typical day for a Truck Driver at the Food Bank can start from anytime between 3:30 AM to 6:30 AM. They [...]
Kids Summer Meals (KSM) provides families with children and teens ages 2-17 an additional resource for healthy, nutritious meals for children during the summer months. The Food Bank has sponsored the program since summer 2009 and through it, have provided nearly 1.8 million meals. KSM sites typically offer breakfast and/or lunch for children when school [...]
Although this is the 14th year of our Stop Summer Hunger initiative, it never gets easier to face the fact that hundreds and thousands of children will be worrying about where their next meal will come from. Rather than looking forward to an extended break from homework and responsibilities, they will be counting down the [...]
In our Food Bank’s 34-county service area, more than 300,000 children are eligible for free and reduced-priced meals at school. When the COVID-19 crisis began, it was these kids and teens that our Programs team here at the Food Bank thought about first: what happens for them and their families if schools close, and after-school [...]
For most children, summer break from school lasts 90 days. This is 90 days too long for the nearly 321,000 children in the Food Bank’s service area who rely on school meals. Fewer than 1 in 6 children have access to summer food programs, which means many of these children and their families will be [...]
Thus far, 2022 has been a year of reflection—thinking back not only on the last year of incredible hardship for all of us, especially our friends and neighbors facing hunger, but also on all the innovation and reinvention that has been possible in the work of the Food Bank this last fiscal year. In August [...]
The Food Bank began work on a new facility at 1000 Greenfield Street in Wilmington – anticipated to open in early 2023. The five-acre tract of land was purchased in 2020 and was the first step to address urgent food insecurity in Brunswick, Columbus, New Hanover, and Pender counties. The new 35,000 square foot facility [...]
