FoodXChange Draws 165 Hartford Residents

One hundred and sixty-five people attended the first ever FoodXChange program at the Hartford Public Library, SAND/Ropkins Branch on July 26, 2017. The event was a partnership of Foodshare’s Promise Zone Hunger Action Team, Hartford Public Library, Farrell Treatment Center, and the House of Bread. This pilot program invited community members to exchange their packaged, processed foods for fresh fruits generously donated by the House of Bread. Altogether, the event exchanged 301 servings of processed, prepackaged food for 653 servings of fresh produce! Most of the participants were parents and children.

In addition to providing participants with healthy food, the FoodXChange featured a number of activities like:

• Live music performed by two students and a teacher from the Charter Oak Cultural Center.
• A sugar demonstration and healthy recipe booklets provided by the UConn SNAP-Ed nutrition program.
• A kid's area with interactive games.

Thank you to all of the community partners and residents who helped make this event a success! 

Grant Thornton Gives Back

Recently, volunteers from Grant Thornton sorted enough produce to provide an outstanding 17,352 meals for our hungry neighbors! Thank you for spending the day at Foodshare as we work together to solve hunger in our community.

Would you like to volunteer with Foodshare? Click here to sign up and explore opportunities, or contact Edna Bailey, Volunteer Coordinator, for more information.  

Healthy FoodXChange

Foodshare's Promise Zone Hunger Action Team (HAT) will be hosting a food exchange program at Hartford Public Library! See flyer below for more details.

Asnuntuck Community College Provides Student Nourishment

Since its opening in February, The Pantry at Asnuntuck Community College has expanded to 166 enrolled recipients and 27 student volunteers. ACC Women’s Leadership Institute graduate Tracy Ouelette, ACC alumna Jordanna Fallon, and Student Activities Director Sherry Paquette founded the pantry after noticing a need among the student body. The Pantry is open Monday-Saturday and provides each student with up to 40 food items per month. It is located in the cashier hallway, and participants need to show a current student ID to be eligible.

Pictured (L-R): Sherry Paquette (ACC), Bea Maslowski (Foodshare), Elizabeth D'Alessandro, & Kathleen Souvigney (Enfield Food Shelf)

The Pantry is sponsored by the ACC Student Government Association, Foodshare, Enfield Food Shelf, ShopRite, Johnson Brunetti Financial Services, and G. Donovan Associates. Sherry Paquette, Tracy Ouelette, and Enfield Food Shelf Executive Director Kathleen Souvigney are all members of Foodshare’s Enfield Hunger Action Team (HAT), which collaborates on efforts to end food insecurity.  To learn more about the Enfield HAT, you can contact our Community Network Builder, Beatrice Maslowski. 

Going Digital to Rescue Food

"Last month, food rescue made a leap to a national scale...Until now, a restaurant, store or catering service with excess food (unless it was a regular on the organization’s pickup list) had to call around to various feeding programs to see which one wanted food and could come to get it. Or the store could call the food bank, which would pick up the food if the donation was large enough, then refrigerate it, and distribute it the next day.

Now Feeding America matches donors and recipients with an algorithm. A restaurant can go on Meal Connect to post an offer of, say, eight trays of fried chicken and biscuits. Meal Connect will automatically match that offer with the closest food pantry or soup kitchen that can get it up right away."

Feeding America's Chief Executive, Diana Aviv, made the following statement about the new digital resource, “This allows us to provide real hot meals,virtually at the same time that someone coming off the street and paying for it would get it.”


Source: New York Times, 5/2/17, Going Digital to Rescue Food

UConn is Helping our Hungry Neighbors

Foodshare would like to acknowledge UConn Help the Hungry, an initiative to end food waste within the UConn family. The five students set 3 goals: educating students, helping UConn give back, and putting healthy food on the table for our food-insecure neighbors. 

For more information, watch the UConn Help the Hungry campaign video above. #GYSD

New Tools To Combat Food Waste

ReFED, a data-driven guide for businesses, government, funders, and nonprofits to collectively reduce food waste at scale, has launched two tools to aid businesses and governments in exploring the best practices in turning the food waste problem into an opportunity for impact.

Policy Finder enables users to better navigate federal, state, and municipal laws and policies on liability protection, tax incentives, animal feed, and waste bans. Additionally, the tool will help users discover recommendations for policy improvements to encourage greater food waste prevention, recovery, and recycling efforts.

The Innovator Database enables users to explore the food waste innovation sector. It categorizes innovators by solution type, organizational status, and geography.  ReFED will use new data gleaned from the database to identify trends, growth areas, and gaps in food waste innovation, ultimately helping drive development of more efficient, scalable solutions.



Source: ReFed, 4/17/17, Food Waste

Food Date Labels...What Do You Really Know?

According to ReFed, a multi-stakeholder nonprofit that focuses on developing solutions to food waste, twenty percent of consumers waste food all due to the confusion of state regulated food date labels.

 Do you know about date food labels? Test your knowledge >

National Volunteer Week: Thank YOU!

Here at Foodshare, we would not be able to lead an informed, coordinated response to hunger without help from our volunteers. Last year, more than 4,700  people donated 44,000 hours – the equivalent of 22 additional full-time employees – through opportunities like Mobile Foodshare, Retail Pick-up, office work, food sorting, Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) boxes and SNAP Outreach.

National Volunteer Week is a chance to inspire, recognize, and encourage volunteers and demonstrate that, by working together, we have the fortitude to overcome challenges and meet our goals.

To celebrate, we will be showcasing some of our dedicated volunteers and their stories as well as providing treats at both our Hartford and Bloomfield locations. If you're interested in sharing your own experience with Foodshare or any of our 300 partner agencies, we'd love to hear from you!

On behalf of Foodshare, and the 137,000 food insecure people you are helping here at home, thank you for sharing your time and talents to make food accessible for all! #NVW2017  #GYSD

Food Deserts Disappearing Thanks to New Retail Outlets

"Even as Sears, Macy’s, and other traditional chains close stores – perhaps 3,500 this year in what some are calling a “retail apocalypse" – grocery chains are opening new outlets. And the fastest growth is happening, not in wealthy suburbia, but in low-income neighborhoods where access to fresh food is often limited. From Kansas City, Mo., to Philadelphia, Chicago to Birmingham, Ala., partnerships of risk-taking entrepreneurs and public officials are quietly solving the nation’s “food desert” problem.

In 2010, there were 8,959 food deserts – low-income census tracts where a significant portion of the population was more than a mile from a large grocery store or supermarket (or more than 10 miles in rural areas). By 2015, there were 9,245 low-income, low-access census tracts, a 3 percent increase, according to the US Department of Agriculture."

Source: The Christian Science Monitor, 4/11/17, Read More >

SCSU Will Host Panel on Food and Sustainability

On Wednesday, April 26, Southern Connecticut State University will partner with the Regional Water Authority, to host a panel discussion on food sustainability. View the flyer below for more more information. Click here to register.

Wholesome Wave Expands Network For Better Access to Produce

"Wholesome Wave, the nonprofit behind the country’s largest prescription program for fruits and vegetables, just awarded $210,000 in grants for the sort of collaboration that doesn’t happen often in the philanthropy world: They’re financing nine partners, from farmers markets to community nonprofits and grocers to take their basic business model and the underlying lessons and technology that’s made it a success, and hopefully expand it.

Each grant recipient is a member of Wholesome Wave’s National Nutritional Incentive Network, which is backed by a several million dollar grant from the USDA’s Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program. The goal is to expand the concept more widely with partners who might already know how to best serve their communities, while at the same time providing coaching and a unified way to track spending, consumption, and consumer satisfaction and health benefits to show the program itself is working."

Source: Fast Company, 03/09/17, Learn More >

Plate Of The Union

The Environmental Working Group and Food Policy Action Education Fund are launching the Plate of the Union campaign, which aims to encourage consumers to become activists for policies that make food safer, make healthy food more accessible, and make food production better for our environment.

The campaign will focus on four main issues:

1. Stopping taxpayer subsidies going to Big Ag polluters; 
2. Protecting and improving anti-hunger programs like SNAP;
3. Increasing federal investments in organic agriculture; and
4. Expanding federal programs to revitalize land and reduce food waste.

The new initiative will deploy grassroots and online tools and tactics to raise awareness about farm and food policies, and show why consumers must demand their right to healthy food as Congress begins crafting a new Farm Bill.

Source: InsuranceNewsNet, 2/22/17, Plate of the Union

UCONN and Shoprite Scored High for Hunger

This past week UConn and Shoprite hit the court to support one of Foodshare's partner agencies, Hands On Hartford.

During the Huskies vs. Temple game, both organizations held a joint food drive, successfully collecting enough food to provide more than 1,900 meals for our hungry neighbors!

Thank you to UConn and ShopRite for all of your efforts. We are so grateful!

Seniors Fed Thanks to Middle Schoolers

Look who we found in our warehouse...a group of lively youngsters from St. Timothy Middle School! Thanks to all of  their hard work and energy, over 400 boxes of food were recently distributed, through the CSFP program, to seniors living in Greater Hartford.

Thank you St. Timothy for engaging your students in this effort to make our community stronger and healthier!

View Photos >

Sam's Club Goes One Step Further to Fight Hunger

In addition to their current contribution of bakery,  meat and frozen food items, one of our most dedicated retail donors—Sam's Club—will now provide produce for our hungry neighbors.

Enthusiasm from staff at both the Newington and Manchester locations, has already resulted in more than 17,000 meals being shared with those in need. We look forward to seeing that number skyrocket even more.

Thank you to Sam's Club for recognizing the need in our community and stepping up to be the difference!

A Partnership to Reduce Hunger Locally and Nationally

The NCSL Foundation for State Legislatures launched the Hunger Partnership in 2010 to raise the visibility of hunger in America and highlight innovative and lasting solutions.  Together, Representative Toni E. Walker and Elaine Zimmerman--Executive Director for the Commission on Children--are leading the charge here in Connecticut

The Hunger Partnership links legislators, legislative staff, and interested businesses to identify innovative and successful programs and develop bipartisan and balanced materials and mechanisms to support legislators in their efforts to reduce hunger in America. State legislators oversee the administration of federal programs, regulate and fund state programs, and convene otherwise disconnected partners to promote effective programs.

Source: NCSL, 1/25/17, Hunger Partnership

Amazon Connects With SNAP

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced Amazon will take part in the agency's latest program on food stamps: the SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot. 

Food stamp recipients will soon be able to purchase groceries online from Amazon. These digital food stamps will aid more than 43 million low-income Americans under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) of the government."

Source: Tech Times, 1/31/17, Read More...

Urban Farmers Receive Millions Here in CT

"Every year, the US Department of Agriculture devotes millions of dollars to farmers in rural areas.
The government is increasingly starting to offer assistance to urban farms, too.

In 2016, the USDA funded a dozen urban farms, the highest number in history, Val Dolicini, the administrator for the USDA Farm Services Agency, tells Business Insider.

USDA Microloans, a program that offers funding up to $50,000, is specifically geared toward urban farmers. Established in 2013, the program has awarded 23,000 loans worth $518 million to farms in California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

Though it is open to all farmers, urban farmers often apply for it because it offers the money on a smaller scale than other programs. Seventy percent (or about 16,100 of those loans) have gone to new farmers, many of them in cities."

Source: CT Post, 12/27/16,  Read More...

Metropolitan AME Zion Church Show of Support

This month, the Metropolitan AME Zion Church in Hartford, held their Christmas Concert to benefit Foodshare. Our President and CEO, James Arena-DeRosa had the opportunity to speak with attendees about our work, sharing how fellow church members could stay involved in fighting hunger here at home.

Thanks to to their overwhelming generosity, we will be able to provide over 3,000 meals for our hungry neighbors this winter and get people connected with longer-term support through programs like SNAP, school breakfast and lunch programs.

Thank you Metropolitan AME Zion for supporting Foodshare this holiday season!