| Company Name |
Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina
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| Address |
500-B Spratt Street
Charlotte, NC 28206
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| Description |
Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina (SHFBM) strives through education, advocacy and partnerships to eliminate hunger by the solicitation and distribution of food. In existence since 1981, Second Harvest provides a regional distribution warehouse and branches that supply food and other essential grocery items to charitable agencies that assist people in need.
SHFBM serves 19 counties, 14 in North Carolina and 5 in South Carolina. Within these 19 counties, Second Harvest provides food for over 600 partner agencies including emergency pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, low-income daycares and senior programs. For fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, SHFBM distributed over 38 million pounds of food and other essential grocery items throughout our region.
Over 15% of the people living in our service area are living at or below the poverty level. In our region there are over 170,000 children living in poverty representing 25% of the total child population. There are almost 40,000 seniors living in poverty who daily must decide between the food they need and the medicine they need. SHFBM provides several different programs targeted at hungry children and seniors including:
Kids Café – The food bank partners with agencies already serving at-risk children like Communities in Schools, the YWCA low-income daycares and Boys and Girls Clubs to make it possible for these sites to provide nutritious meals and snacks to children attending every day. We operate 42 of these sites in 12 different counties;
Backpack Program – The food bank provides backpacks full of nutritious ready-to-eat foods for children to take home on weekends and holidays when school meals are not available. In 2011-2012, SHFBM provided over 85,000 filled backpacks at 100 sites in 16 different counties;
Second Helping – The food bank provides boxes of supplemental groceries to homebound seniors in 8 different counties. These boxes are provided by Second Harvest and delivered by our Meals on Wheels partner agencies each month.
The Food Bank also works to eliminate food waste in our region through the Community Food Rescue Program. Our “Go Green” program picks up and redistributes on the same day perishable foods that are safe to eat, but that would have otherwise been thrown away. Operating 52 weeks per year, six days per week, this program saved over 4 million pounds of food in 2011-2012.
The Food Bank also works hard to target rural areas where poverty rates are high and resources are scarce. Each year SHFBM provides over 325 mobile pantries in these rural areas. Each pantry trip delivers between 5,000 and 10,000 pounds of food and serves up to 300 families directly off the truck. Over 2.4 million pounds of food were provided through this program in 2011-2012.
SHFBM is also working to eliminate pet hunger in our region through our Pet Food Bank. We annually distribute hundreds of thousands of pounds of pet food to families struggling to keep their pets and to dozens of animal rescue groups throughout our region.
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