This past year, we achieved so much together. We distributed more food, helped more kids grow healthy and strong, and raised awareness of food insecurity in central & eastern North Carolina. Here are the Food Bank highlights from 2014:

  1. We launched a blog, without which we couldn’t bring you this awesome post.
  2. We partnered with an elementary school in Apex to create our first school pantry and expanded the program throughout the year thanks to our School Pantry Program founding partner Biogen Idec.
  3. We celebrated 15 years of service in the Durham community and opened a new Durham Branch location which will ultimately increase our capacity to provide more food and better services by 60%.
  4. We served a record number of kids through our Kids Summer Meals program at 105 summer feeding sites and launched a pilot initiative to serve hot meals at select locations.
  5. We successfully completed a rigorous Feeding America inspection at all six of our distribution centers, ensuring that we have maintained a credible, safe, and effective distribution system for donated food.
  6. We shifted from talking about poverty statistics to food insecurity rates in order to properly represent the population we serve and the tremendous need.
  7. Our Sandhills Branch hosted our first annual Linda Hubbard Award Celebration that raised enough money to provide 15,000 meals to the kids in our Moore County BackPack Pals Program and commemorated the extraordinary service of the former Director of the program.
  8. Our annual Students Against Hunger food & fund drive brought together 118 schools and provided over 362,000 meals to local families.
  9. We celebrated 15 years of service in the Greenville community and our Greenville Branch distributed their 100 millionth pound of food, a true milestone.
  10. We received a grant from Cisco for $100,000 worth of Cisco technical equipment, improving our critical infrastructure, communications systems, and ability to work efficiently.
  11. We built collaborations that enabled our partner agencies to directly rescue 10,589,611 pounds of food from retail stores (42% increase from 2013), ensuring less food in our landfills and more meals for families in need.
  12. We received two walk-in coolers, a walk-in freezer, two semi trucks and trailers, and other warehouse equipment from Food Lion, increasing our capacity to distribute more food efficiently, especially fresh produce.
  13. We began partnerships with two local farms that now plant acres of fresh, nutritious produce just for the families we serve, resulting in 300,000 pounds of donated, farm-fresh produce in 2014.
  14. Through our Three Squares for CENC program, we helped 1,455 individuals complete FNS benefits applications, generating $1,453,527 for local economies.
  15. We distributed over 57 million pounds of food, including more than 16.5 million pounds of fresh produce. (*calendar year results)

2014 was an incredible year. We are so grateful for the continued support of the communities across our region and their commitment to hunger relief. On behalf of all of us at the Food Bank, thank you for your partnership, and Happy New Year.

Food Bank Team 2014

The 2014 Food Bank Team at our Raleigh Branch

*We operate on a fiscal year that begins on July 1. The achievements highlighted above are for the calendar year 2014. To learn more about our goals and progress for our fiscal year 2014-2015, please visit our website.