"The Foodshare Experience"

At the Foodshare Annual Meeting back in March, one of the door prize gifts was called "The Foodshare Experience."  It was actually scheduled for today and was a full day with me, engaging with just some of the activities Foodshare might be involved in on any given day.

Active volunteers Chris and Jim won the prize and we had a great day together today.  Our agenda included:

• The Foodshare Safety Committee meeting this morning, at which the Bloomfield Deputy Fire Marshall was our guest.  We talked about how we might need to change our fire evacuation
  and drill procedures in our expanded building and did a walk through to check on the status of exit signs and such throughout the building.
• Then we drove to First Church of Christ in Glastonbury, which was hosting the Mobile Foodshare truck today and served 151 households, a new record for that site!  This site also provides SNAP outreach to help people enroll in the program and a nutrition ed component with volunteers from UConn handing out recipes for the produce.  State Representative Srinivasan also stopped by the Church.
• Next stop was Foodshare's facility at the Connecticut Regional Market, where Jim and Chris were quite impressed by the volume of fresh produce handled, the number of volunteers involved, and all of the inventory management and logistical issues involved in making it work!
• After a lunch at the Market Restaurant, a hidden gem within the Regional Market, we traveled back to Foodshare's distribution center in Bloomfield.  Our original plan had been to work in the reclamation area sorting food, but since Jim does that every week as a volunteer, we made a shift and instead they joined me on a conference call with Feeding America about the contract that local food banks like Foodshare have with Feeding America.

While this was a broad cross-section of our work at Foodshare and Jim and Chris expressed their appreciation for learning so much about what we do, it was only a taste.  We did not touch food donors, retail pick-up, Hunger Action Teams or many other aspects of our work.

So this one-time idea and this tour today have inspired me to look for ways to offer more tours to volunteers and donors in the future.  Look for more details to come!