FAFB Food Banks utilize many services to help fight hunger throughout the State of Florida.
Community Kitchens
The Community Kitchens program is a simple but enormously successful concept. Modeled after a program that started over ten years ago at the D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington D.C., Community Kitchens trains unemployed people in the culinary profession, giving them valuable kitchen skills, while they re-prepare rescued surplus food into balanced meals that are served to people in need. Courses are taught by professional chefs and usually include life-skills and job-readiness training, as well as placement in career-track positions in the foodservice industry.
The Community Kitchens program has an outstanding record, with a job retention rate of more than eighty percent for program graduates. This compares to the thirty to forty percent of those who left welfare and found other jobs who were no longer working twelve months later.
Kids Cafe
Kids Cafe is one of the nation's largest free meal service programs for children. Since the program's inception in 1993, Kids Cafes have become a central tool in our efforts to end childhood hunger.
Goals
The primary goal of the Kids Cafe program is to provide free and
prepared food and nutrition education to hungry children. Kids
Cafes across the country achieve this goal by utilizing existing
community resources where children already naturally congregate, such as Boys and Girls Clubs or schools.
Currently there are more than 600 Kids Cafes, operated by more than 80 food banks across the nation.
In addition to providing hot meals to hungry kids, some Kids Cafes programs also offer a safe place, where under the supervision of trustworthy staff, a child can get involved in educational, recreational and social activities that draw on existing community programs and often include family members.
History
In Savannah, Georgia, 1989, two young brothers were discovered
late one night in the kitchen of their housing project's community
center. The older brother had broken into the kitchen to feed
himself and his younger brother. In response to this glaring example
of childhood hunger in their local community, the Second Harvest
Food Bank of Coastal Georgia started the first Kids Cafe and in
1993 America's Second Harvest launched the national Kids Cafe
program. There are currently more than 600 Kids Cafes in operation
in the U.S., with plans to expand the number of sites.
Disaster Relief
Feed America, formerly known as America's Second Harvest, the nation's largest charitable domestic hunger-relief organization, was first involved with disaster relief in 1989 following Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Pieta earthquake that struck San Francisco and the Central California Coast. Since then, Feed America has taken an active role in recovery efforts following major disasters and is a member of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD).
Through a network of over 200 regional food banks and food-rescue programs, Feed America is able to provide relief supplies to emergency feeding centers serving disaster victims. In many disaster situations, Feed America's network provides supplies to emergency feeding centers operated by the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, the Southern Baptist Convention, and others.
Depending on the degree of devastation, Feed America may need to secure an additional food bank warehouse to handle the disaster relief supplies. Teams of volunteers from the network also may be required to staff the additional storage facilities. All of these measures are designed to ensure that the demand for food and grocery supplies is met.
In addition to the daily disaster of hunger, the Feed America network is well prepared to respond to the devastation of disasters. No matter where disaster strikes across the country, Feed America's network can provide relief for hungry people.
Fresh Food Initiative
To increase the network's capacity to handle fresh foods, Feed America has established the Fresh Foods Initiative. The program offers a comprehensive array of services built around securing and distributing produce, fish, meat, poultry, prepared foods from restaurants and cafeterias, dairy, and bakery items to Feed America's food banks and food-rescue programs. The result is more fresh foods being distributed to hungry people through our network than ever before. For example, last year America's Second Harvest distributed enough donated fish through our network to provide 12 million meals to hungry Americans. And last fiscal year alone we distributed 58 million pounds, providing 174 million servings of fresh produce to the hungry Americans we serve.