Skip to main content

Possible Help for Food Banks


The slow economy has put pressure on food banks to serve more people with the same or fewer resources. Now, the level of EBT benefits has been cut, so people who often struggled to make it through the month now have less food. More of those people will run out of money and food before the end of the month, and will turn to their local food bank for help. Will there be enough food for all when the time comes? No, in many cases the shelves will be bare.

How can food banks meet increasing demands for food?

This question has two dimensions: the immediate need for more food and the long-term challenge of securing reliable access to more food from donors. One hopes the long-term need doesn’t materialize, but realism requires being prepared.  

The immediate need for additional food donations can be handled in several ways. If you run a food bank or just volunteer regularly, then you probably know what the options are: appealing to current donors, approaching new donors, using emergency cash or credit to buy some food.

Do you have cash reserves or a credit line to tap in emergencies? Well, generating extra cash for November might seem unrealistic, but isn’t. Could you get a business credit card and use that to buy some food. Apply today and, if you can get a card, you could have it in two weeks. In the meantime call some wholesalers and warehouse clubs to see what sort of deal you can get.
What about measures for long-term food supplies? There will be ongoing demand and periodic crises. Several strategies are available to you. I’ll come back to the really creative later. First, let’s recap some of the regular options:
1. What new business and nonprofit partnerships might make sense? Don't focus on food. Could you also get help with operating costs, or rent? Cut costs one place, get more done elsewhere.
2. If you have resources to share, could some sort of bartering arrangement be worked out?
3. Could you start a business venture to generate some extra revenue each month?
4. Could you partner with farms or ranches in the region to grow some food? What about CSAs and community gardens?
Of course I can’t offer specifics here, but I think you can figure out the sorts of business ventures or partnership arrangements are realistic for your specific situation.
Now, or when the latest food crisis passes, it might be useful to think about a whole new approach to your food bank and its business model.  I’ll address that option and offer some creative planning tips in my next post or two.

 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Brainstorming for Fundraising Success

Looking for opportunities to raise more money or just to use your fundraising resources more efficiently? This post is another of a series on brainstorming and fundraising. You need three things to think creatively about fundraising. Openness to new ways of thinking is a requirement. Attitude matters in creative thinking, so you need to be positive and nonjudgmental. You also need to be familiar with one or more brainstorming tools. In recent posts I’ve described some brainstorming tools created by Edward De Bono and described in various books of his. In those posts I referred to using random ideas or objects to spark new ideas. In this post I will rely on a fantasy question, a provocation in De Bono’s terms, as a starting point. Consider this fantasy question: What if every donor supported 1000 charities? That question can potentially spark new ideas, if examined in the right way. De Bono writes about several ways of creating movement from a provocation like that question. I’ll qui...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...
Post a Comment
Read more