Foodbank seeks expansion locally

November 11, 2009

Foodbank seeks expansion locally

MARK E. RONDEAU, Bennington Banner

BENNINGTON -- With a new food distribution center in Brattleboro, the head of the Vermont Foodbank wants Bennington County residents and agencies to know what the program has to offer here.

The new 21,000-square-foot center joins the program's main warehouse in South Barre. The southern Vermont location makes easier delivery to the 50 agencies the Foodbank serves in Windham, Windsor and Bennington counties, said CEO John Sayles.

"We really feel that we can better serve Southern Vermont by having a presence here," he said, during a visit to the Banner office last week. "Now that we'll have two main distribution centers, we'll be able to be much more efficient, rather than sending trucks back and forth from South Barre."

The Foodbank, a non-profit organization, has 280 network partners - mostly food shelves and soup kitchens-- throughout the state.

The new distribution center provides the opportunity for some agencies in southern Vermont to actually pick up their orders at the new center rather than wait for the once-a-month delivery from the South Barre distribution center.

"We're also able to source more food," Sayles said. "We have more distribution center capacity, and being in southern Vermont gives us easier access to food coming up from the south."

Current Vermont Foodbank network partners in Bennington County include the Sunrise Family Resource Center, the Community Food Cupboard in Manchester, the Bennington Food Shelf hosted by BROC, the Bible Baptist Food Basket, the Arlington Food Shelf, the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont, Bennington County Meals, and Applegate Housing.

"We're hoping also that by being present in southern Vermont that we'll be able to attract more organizations to want to be members of the Foodbank, network partners, that they'll see more benefit," Sayles said. "Perhaps they thought that they were too small to become a member of the Foodbank."

Sayles is hoping to dispel that idea.

"We would love to have more distribution sites. Our mission is to gather and share quality food and nurture partnerships that will end hunger in Vermont. The more partners we have, the more food we can distribute, the more that will get to people in need. And that is our core mission."

Sayles came to Bennington with Stephan Morse, former speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives, a resident of Newfane in Windham County and a consultant to the Foodbank.

"We in Windham County feel almost as much as you do in Bennington County about services reaching southern Vermont," Morse said. "And these guys are real leaders in my opinion, charging to have a statewide distribution of a very worthwhile program."

Few would dispute the need for such a program. "We know that the need is greater. We've heard from our agencies that the use of food shelves and soup kitchens is up 35 to 40 percent," Sayles said. "And that varies by area, but that's an average, in some places well over 50 percent."

"At least 66,000 individual Vermonters have accessed the charitable food system this year. We distributed 7.5 million pounds of food, and we'll do at least 8 million pounds next year, and that's a lot of food,"he added."The year before that it was 6.5 million pounds of food."

The Foodbank receives donations from retailers, manufacturers, distributors, growers and from food drives and also gets food from the federal government from two USDA food programs, close to 2.5 millon pounds of federal food last year.

One source of food is a meat reclamation program.

"The grocery stores, when the meat gets to a sell-by date, they freeze it. Once a week we pick it up, then we sort it into categories and it goes straight out to the food shelves and soup kitchens," Sayles said.

"And we want the stores here in Bennington to be able to participate in those programs. We think with our Brattleboro distribution center now we'll much more likely be able to do food rescue here in Bennington County."

The Vermont Foodbank's farm gleaning program recently received mention in The New York Times Magazine, with more than 300,000 pounds of produce harvested this year for the hungry. Of this, more than 100,000 pounds was actually "field gleaned" by volunteers and the rest was donated by farmers. Farms all over the state are participating.

Sayles came to the Vermont Foodbank in March. Prior to this he was a deputy secretary in the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. Southern Vermont residents are likely to be seeing a lot more of him in the future.

"We're really thrilled to be down here and I hope to be a regular presence in Bennington, that people will get to know me as the face of the foodbank down here."

The Vermont Foodbank can be reached at 802-476-3341; on the Web, http://www.vtfoodbank.org/.

November 11, 2009

Press Room