Today, the need for the Capital Area Food Bank is greater than ever.  Hunger in the region has increased by over 25 percent and is persistent.  It’s an absolute tragedy that what started as a temporary relief effort has become a community institution.

In 1980, we were determined to strengthen and expand the network of community-based social service agencies that provided food and assistance to the needy.  The answer was a region-wide food bank that would have the ability to collect, store and distribute items. Last year, the CAFB distributed 30 million pounds of food, including 15 million pounds of fresh produce, through over 700 partner agencies located throughout the Washington metro region.

 As we face another dramatic increase in hunger Annie Gowen reminds in a recent Washington Post article, “About two-thirds of the public now believes there are strong conflicts between the rich and poor in America, making class a likelier source of tension than traditional flash points of race or nationality, a study from the Pew Research Center found.”

In response to this critical situation, the Capital Area Food Bank began construction on a new $37 million distribution center in January of 2011 that will enable us to double our current storage and distribution capacity over time. When the new facility is complete this June, the Capital Area Food Bank will relocate to Puerto Rico Ave., NE – a short walk from our current warehouse on Taylor Street, NE.

 A bigger facility means that we can distribute a higher quantity and quality of food.  It also means that our nutrition education and outreach programs, which address the root causes of hunger, can be expanded.  Our new warehouse space will be a large as two football fields, twice the size of our current space.  This means we can eventually accept and distribute twice as much food to our neighbors.

 Features and fixtures such as motion sensor lights, low-flow faucets, and solar panels – donated by BP – mean over $70,000 in energy cost savings per year – savings that leave us with more resources to help our neighbors.

 Many of our 700 partner agencies are very small nonprofit groups with few resources available to develop their own capacities to serve clients.  Our new Technology and Resource Center will house stations where agencies can place online food orders and apply for grants via the web.

With room to grow our base of volunteers – currently over 14,000 – we can provide them with special stations for sorting food.  They can place rice, beans and other nutritious bulk items into small containers for easy client access.

 New space will be provided for classrooms, along with commercial and teaching kitchens. The Kids Cafe program can provide a greater variety of after-school meals and snacks.  More seniors will receive much needed food through the Brown Bag Program.

We are grateful for the opportunity of providing an essential community service to the Washington metro area for the past 32 years. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his words have always inspired me.  Now, more than ever, they guide us and our mission, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” 

With any purchase of Unto Others Jewelry, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the CAFB. 

Wharton partnered with the food bank earlier this year to help raise awareness about local hunger and has participated in numerous CAFB initiatives. 

So show off your unique sense of fashion and help the thousands of families, children and seniors in our community struggling to get one of life’s most basic needs – food.

In an effort to prioritize good health, the Capital Area Food Bank works with local farms, farmers markets and local food projects to get more fresh produce into the hands of our low-income neighbors.   Through Share the Harvest Gift Project, every dollar enables more families in this area to receive additional fresh produce and improve their health. 

When you purchase a gift in someone’s name, you’ve made it possible for us to partner with more local farms and purchase extra fresh produce for people in need.  It doesn’t stop there.  The Capital Area Food Bank offers a wide variety of nutrition education classes that help people make the most of the fresh produce they receive.  Additionally, youth are engaged through garden and cooking programs that weave the message of nutrition into tangible activities.   Your contribution helps us train leaders at social service organizations to be nutrition educators in their own communities. 

Please help us work for long-term solutions by sourcing locally grown produce and providing people with not only the healthiest food, but also the educational tools they need to improve their own health now and in the future.

To find out more about Share the Harvest please click here.

Greater Access to Produce

The community center at Southern Ridge Apartments, a Community and Preservation Development Corporation property in Ward 8 is a Kids Cafe site and was chosen to be part of this pilot initiative. Through the Kids Cafe program, Southern Ridge receives snacks and suppers to serve to kids ages 5-18 who attend the center every day after school.  In an effort to combine education and greater access to nutritious fresh produce, we held two cooking demonstrations for residents of Southern Ridge. Through an established relationship with the Ward 8 Farmers Market and this grant, we were able to offer any resident who attended the demonstrations $20 to purchase fresh produce items at the market held at THEARC.

Cooking Demonstrations

Food For Kids Manager Grace Lichaa led both cooking demonstrations.  She chose fresh produce items that would be accessible at the farmers market and used them to make great fall foods. In September, Grace made sweet potato chips in the toaster oven and collard greens cooked with onions, sliced crisp apples and vegetable broth. The collard greens brought on a great discussion of the many ways residents cook their own collard greens!

At the next cooking demonstration in October, which had another great turn-out of new residents and return guests, Grace made sweet potato black bean soup… in the microwave, with the option of topping off the soup with fresh cilantro purchased at the market.  This was a big hit!  She also made massaged kale salad with a fresh lemon and garlic dressing.

These cooking demonstrations have been a great success. Twenty dollars for produce and the sharing of food and ideas is a huge incentive to bring people to the community center, but the cooking demonstrations have proven to be more than this. Residents come together and make connections with each other, share events, such as a turkey give-away in time for Thanksgiving, at a local church, Ms. Cora Clark-Miles, the Resident Services Manager is able to spread the word about the many free trainings and events she is hosting for the residents, and most of all, a sense of community is instilled in those in attendance.

The Snack Box program delivers healthy snack ingredients along with recipes and educational materials to Kids Café sites so that site leaders can engage in interactive, educational snack preparation with children.

Valencia Jackson, our new Kids Cafe® Nutrition Education Trainer, created this snack and lesson during her first month on the job! The purpose of the lesson was to talk about fruits and reinforce the USDA’s new guidelines to fill half your plate with fruits and vegetables. Valencia created an educational activity where kids attach their favorite fruits to half of their breakfast, lunch, and dinner plates – because fruit makes every meal a party! Valencia distributed the Snack Box to 21 sites, providing resources to Kids Cafe site leaders to make snack time healthy, educational, and fun.

Valencia is packing up the October Snack Box lesson – Half Moon Veggie Pita – today. This lesson will focus on the benefits of vegetables and will again reinforce the recommendation to fill half you plate with fruits and vegetables.

In the shadow of the nation’s capital, hunger can be found in schools, on playgrounds, in assisted living facilities, and more recently in manicured homes of middle-class families.  Here in the Washington metro area, hunger is not distended bellies or sunken eyes – but children who look forward to school, not to learn, but to eat school meals; seniors who have to choose between eating or buying medicine; and parents who work multiple jobs but still struggle to feed their families. 

CBS Evening News recently reported this epidemic in a segment featuring The Capital Area Food Bank and partner agency Children on Mine, Inc.

We are facing a hunger crisis in the Washington metro area and across the nation. Hunger in our region has increased by more than 25 percent since 2006 and affects 640,000 individuals, including one out of every two children in the nation’s capital. This threatening economy is impacting not only the poor, but the middle class, as well.  

Food is the most basic human right and we must work together to ensure that all have access to quality, nutritious meals – three times a day.  Help the food bank nourish those in need.  To make a donation, please click here.  Or to volunteer, please click here.

We just finished our eighth week of the Farm Youth Initiative and despite this summer’s heat, our kids seem to love getting out of the city to visit Clagett Farm.  A joint venture of the CAFB and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Clagett is a 285-acre, certified organic farm located in Upper Marlboro, MD.  The FYI program consists of a two-day nutrition and gardening class for children from Kids Cafe sites in the Washington metropolitan area.  FYI education themes change every growing season, with this year’s theme centered on every child’s favorite thing – snack time!

The first day is a one-hour session on how to read an ingredient list in order to tell if you have a healthy snack.  The class uses hands-on demonstrations and activities to keep the kids interested including getting to prepare a snack together in groups.  The “edu-tainment” continues the next day with games and activities at Clagett Farm.  Students plant, water and harvest fresh vegetables from the “pizza” and “pasta” ingredient gardens.  Then, they make a healthy pasta salad together with the freshly picked vegetables.  They also get to play in the sprinkler and feed crickets to the Clagett chickens.

Close to 200 children participated in the program this summer.  The Farm Youth Initiative is a truly collaborative project.  The program works across a number of departments within the food bank, including the Food for Kids, Harvest for Health and the Nutrition Education departments. This year, FYI operated at 11 different sites in and around DC, with some sites participating more than once. 

As part of the Fresh Produce Grant shared between the CAFB and Clagett Farm, every child who goes through the two-day course receives a ½ CSA share, which works out to about 75 pounds of fresh, organic produce for every site who participates in the program.  In addition to the CSA shares the students take home with corresponding recipes, participants harvested over 145 pounds of fresh produce.

As one young participant put it, “This is more fun than all you can eat pizza and wing night at my summer camp!”

We couldn’t agree more.

Took our tykes to a farm!

As part of being a site served by the Capital Area Food Bank (our kids receive a daily afterschool snack and, now that it’s summer, lunch) we get to participate in the Farm Youth Initiative, where our kids get to visit a local farm to learn all about healthy plants and how we grow ‘em.

One long and not entirely barf-free bus ride brought us to Clagett Farm, which partners with the food bank. We were ushered into a barn where I immediately met the beautiful, comforting sight of scads of fresh garlic hanging from the ceiling to dry (garlic that I’ve been getting to eat all week, garlic that is SPECTACULAR!)

I admired the attitude they tried to instill about nature in the kids; they pointed out that yes there were bugs everywhere on the farm, but were it not for the bees and the wasps doing their crucial pollinating, they would have no new plants. “Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you. You are a giant. They are scared of you.” And sure enough, everyone stayed calm and no one got stung.

We began with some games that reviewed good nutrition (the kids had already received an intro nutrition class back at our site).  The way they approached everything was simple and age-appropriate.  The basic take-home lessons were

1. The first ingredients should be something good for you
2. A short list is a good list
3. Don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce

In this activity, which involved buckets of water (many many points for farm people!), the kids ran relays to dump cups into buckets. Their cups had ingredients written on them (everything from “carrots” to “high fructose corn syrup”) and they had to pour them into the “healthy” or “unhealthy” bucket. They were into it!

Then we marched up to the small but beautifully maintained gardens.

Clagett farm is gigantic (it was originally a tobacco farm that was repurposed for organic fruits and veggies and various education programs), but this little section is specifically for the Farm Youth Initiative, the partnership with the Capital Area Food Bank that brought us here.

They very cleverly divided up the garden into the “pasta garden” (ingredients that you would put into pasta or a pasta salad like the one we’d eat later that day), and a “pizza garden” (ingredients for pizza).  A great way for kids to see fresh veggies not as (eurgh) actual fresh veggies but as ingredients in delicious foods with which they were comfortable and familiar.

And they got to pick them!

The instructors reviewed the techniques for properly picking tomatoes, hot peppers (hint: don’t touch them directly or they’ll burn you!), and carrots (which were tricky to get out of the ground! They stepped in giving them a little nudge with a spade. Apparently the trick to picking carrots when they’re ready is to wait until you can see the orange tops of the carrots sticking out).

The kids were all responsible for washing and weighing their produce (they were annoyed that they didn’t get to hold on to their individual tomatoes and carrots, because some were “better” than others. I swear to God, the things kids come up with to be competitive about are truly insane).

Anyway, they ended up with a pretty good lookin’ stash!

We played around the garden a little more: while one of the guides ran to another building to get supplies, I introduced the kids to “nature’s gum” (fresh mint).  They were super into it! When I was a kid and we’d go out to dinner, I always ate the mint garnish on fancy desserts (well I mean, actually I still do).

Then we got to play in the sprinkler (which is totally still just as fun when you’re an adult) and then paid a visit to some chickens!

The guides told the kids that the chickens liked eating juicy crickets, grasshoppers, and praying mantises, and the kids had WAY too much fun catching bugs and throwing them into the chickens. The chickens were actually eating straight out of kids’ hands by the end of it (which our guides said was really unusual).

Back to the barn we went, for a quick activity identifying the veggies we saw in the garden that went into the snack we were about to eat.

And then it was local food time! Whoo! I was very very obviously very very excited.

The table was beautifully laid out, with scrumptious looking whole-wheat pasta salad, that contained (this is clever, people with kids should do this) vegetables that were shredded so finely you were hard-pressed to tell what they were).

And bowls with a colorful selection of the veggies they themselves had picked (those yellow tomatoes are probably the most sweet, delicious of their kind I have ever been fortunate enough to taste) and, to keep the kiddos happy, some cheese.

In general, I was disappointed about how little the kids ate. A lot of them raved about the cucumbers (perhaps the texture of that is more familiar to them? Kids like crunch?), and some of them just kept on eating the yummy salad, but in general they were still kind of apprehensive about the whole thing. We also just have a bunch who never seem to eat anything…

Anyway, I sure did! And more and more and more. I could not stop. It was SO GOOD!

Hilarious: I point my camera at this, and Karen, one of our most sarcastic fifth graders (whom I adore), looks at me and says, “You would take a picture of your pasta salad, Ileana”.

Yes. I would.

Trip concluded with a visit to the porta potties. Mitigated by the beautiful flowers blooming near them!

Today, I had the pleasure of conducting a site visit at the Fort Washington Food Pantry, located at and administered by Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Fort Washington, MD.  The Fort Washington Food Pantry has been in existence for more than 20 years.  I have been an Outreach Coordinator at the food bank for three years and have conducted over 180 site visits, yet I continue to be impressed by the generosity of the wonderful volunteers who often coordinate these feeding programs.

But today was different.  While I was touched by the generosity, love and care they put into the pantry; this wasn’t the most impressive quality I found at the pantry.  Nor was it the fact that they feed 7,155 people a year providing 12 pounds of food during each visit, are a client choice pantry, are in the process of moving into a new space in the building to accommodate more shelving, and will potentially open one more day a week. What impressed me the most is that they knew the value of one dollar.

Currently, to feed the 7,155 people a year they serve, the pantry spends $5,451 annually.  If you break that down it takes them roughly $0.76 to feed one person or $3.80 to feed a family of four a year!  Some of us spend more than $3.80 on our favorite smoothie or coffee drink.  As a partner agency of the food bank, they are able to stretch their dollars to serve over 7,000 people each year!  This renewed my hope that if all of us in the Washington metro region give just a little bit more, we can feed the more than 600,000 people in this region that are affected by hunger!

Please click here to learn more about the Fort Washington Food Pantry.

AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps is working with the Capital Area Food Bank to end hunger in the Washington metro region.   

Together, the food bank and NCCC transport thousands of vegetables; assist D.C. residents with food stamp applications; teach kids the importance of a healthy diet; and package food for after school/ summer programs for children – all in an effort to end hunger in the nation’s capital.  The members of NCCC were humbled and inspired by Brian Banks, the CAFB’s Director of Public Policy and Community Outreach, who recently delivered a short and powerful message. 

“Hunger can happen everywhere.  People come home from work and the kids ask, ‘What’s for dinner?’  Mom or dad goes to open that refrigerator and all they see is a bright light.  What we do here with the help of volunteers like you is to help feed people and educate the general public about hunger in our communities.”  

The team, Moose 1, work three days a week at Clagett Farm in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, toiling away in the fields planting thousands of potatoes, egg plants, zucchinis, peas and peppers – all of which will either be sold to shareholders or donated to the CAFB.  Volunteers also mend broken fence posts, weed fields, stack hay, and transplant vegetable cuttings into larger pots to help them grow.  Each day at the farm brings a new challenge to Moose 1; and each day the team tackles these challenges with enthusiasm and high spirits.

Moose 1 works at both the D.C. and NOVA warehouses for the remainder of the week.  In the morning, Moose 1 goes into the community, informs residents about the SNAP Program and gets them started with the application process.  In the afternoon, Moose 1 sorts and packs meals for the Kids Cafe program, and also visits Kids Cafe sites to teach school-aged children about the importance of nutrition.  It is a real treat for Moose 1 to interact with members of the community and to hear their stories.  After each encounter, team members walk away with a smile knowing they have made a positive impact on another’s life.

Written  by:  Mike Rood and Stephanie Snyder