Organization: Bald Ridge Lodge
Location: Cumming
Project: Nutritionally Appropriate Food for Traumatized Young Men in Foster Care
Amount Requested: $10,000
Counties Served: Cherokee, Dawson, Forsyth, Hall
Project Description: BRL serves young men (starting at age 12 and into young adulthood) in our Group Home, Aftercare Program, and Independent Living Program (ILP). These young men have been removed from their homes for abuse, neglect, and other trauma. In recent years, BRL has been routinely at or near capacity in our Group Home and ILP. In the same timeframe, food prices have increased generally and specifically the cost of providing nutritional and appealing meals and snacks for growing teenage boys has increased. In addition to the challenge of meeting the varying likes and dislikes of teenage boys, BRL must address the specific health-related, nutritional needs of each resident, big or small. Many of these health & nutritional needs have roots in the young men’s history of trauma, especially neglect of their medical and nutritional needs. This trauma has caused physical health issues, disordered eating, food insecurity, and other food related issues. BRL has also seen a related increase in residents who are overweight at the time of placement as well as residents with significant food allergies. In addition to meeting these needs, BRL also seeks to introduce residents to new foods, expanding their tastes and experiences with additional healthy options. BRL employs a Youth Services Specialist (YSS) who creates daily menus for the Group Home. While preparing the menus and shopping list, the YSS provides Life Skills training around food and meal planning, purchasing, and preparation. In addition to feeding the Group Home residents, as part of the ILP program, BRL provides a weekly stipend for grocery shopping to each ILP resident to help them practice their skills for planning, shopping, and budgeting for meals. BRL employs a Life Coach who oversees the ILP residents’ efforts to plan, purchase, and prepare appropriate meals for themselves. Our Aftercare program can also provide emergency food to former residents (and their caregivers/support systems) in crisis situations. 2
Organization: Boys & Girls Clubs of Lanier
Location: Buford
Project: Boys & Girls Clubs of Lanier's Afterschool and Summer Snack and Meal Program
Amount Requested: $10,000
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: The Buford Club of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Lanier offers academically enriching after-school and summer programs, prioritizing access for students most in need of support. One of the cornerstones of our approach is our comprehensive snack and meal program, which plays a vital role in promoting healthy lifestyles, supporting academic success, and providing food access for families facing food insecurity. Hunger impairs concentration, hindering students from fully engaging in academics and maximizing program benefits. Our programs emphasize three main areas: academic achievement, good character and citizenship, and healthy lifestyles. Academically, we provide tutoring, homework assistance, an activity-based STEM curriculum, and a summer learning-loss prevention program. Good character and citizenship programs focus on developing leadership skills through small-group activities centered on service, education, health, and social recreation. To promote healthy lifestyles, we offer targeted programs that increase physical activity and teach good nutrition. We recognize the significance of not only educating students about proper nutrition but also attending to their nutritional needs, particularly since many of them come from low-income backgrounds with limited access to nutritious meals. A significant portion of our Club members' families work low-wage jobs and struggle to put food on the table. With this in mind, our mission is clear: no student in our program should go hungry. To achieve this, we provide access to nourishing snacks and meals for afterschool and summer program participants. Access to food becomes even more crucial during the summer months when schools are not in session to provide lunches, leaving families solely responsible for ensuring their children are adequately fed. Moreover, we focus on reaching out to families who are in the greatest need of food assistance and provide them with food to take home, ensuring their essential needs are fulfilled. By ensuring that our students and their families have access to nutritious food, we not only support their physical health but also enhance their academic performance and overall well-being. 3
Organization: Campus Church
Location: Norcross
Project: Project Kids Eat
Amount Requested: $10,000
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: Project Kids Eat (PKE) feeds children living in 4 extended stay hotels and 2 low-income apartment complexes breakfast, snacks, and a hot lunch in the summers when school lunches are not available. We also provide toiletries and cleaning supplies throughout the summer, as well as activity kits for the children and feminine hygiene products. In 2023 we distributed 5,388 lunches and in 2022 we distributed 5,741 meals. Since 2015 PKE has served 47,829 meals to children in our community. PKE has been feeding children in the extended stay hotels in Norcross since 2000 when awareness of food insecurity became evident in our community. Beginning summer 2024 we will be adding 2 additional hotels in an effort to train more churches to begin similar food distribution projects at extended stay hotels located in their vicinity. Part of this initiative is for PKE to supply meals for the hotels while the new churches provide volunteers to deliver meals and develop relationships with the families and hotel management. Please note that PKE is a project of Campus Church, but it is not part of the general budget of the church. PKE has its own restricted fund that is solely used for PKE expenses. PKE's funds are received through private donations, grants, and through a special giving collection at Campus Church. PKE has no employees as Julie Williams, the director, is employed by Campus Church and food is packaged and distributed by volunteers.
Organization: Corners Outreach
Location: Norcross
Project: Curbing Food Insecurity for Low-income Families of Color
Amount Requested: $75,000 (after receiving a grant from the Good2Give Fund)
Counties Served: De Kalb, Gwinnett
Project Description: Corners Outreach serves 4,000 individuals annually through various programs, and the price increases for food and rent has made life harder than before the pandemic. On average, Corners families lives 200% below the poverty line, according to a recent study by The United Way of Metro Atlanta. This project will build a walkable food pantry at the new Corners Community Center in Norcross, which is currently seeing more than 500 people per day. Through a partnership with the Atlanta Community Food Bank, Corners will build a walkable food pantry at the new Corners Community Center at 1854 Shackleford Court in Norcross, and give upwards of 150,000 lbs of food annually. During a time when food prices are on the rise, and families are being paid low wages, something like food can make all the difference.
Organization: Creative Enterprises
Location: Lawrenceville
Project: “Follow Me” to Creative Enterprises' Community Garden
Amount Requested: $18,100
Counties Served: Barrow, Forsyth, Gwinnett, Walton
Project Description: We want to produce a large quantity of high quality organic food in our community garden to distribute within our community. For 43 years, Creative Enterprises has served families in Gwinnett by creating opportunities to close the achievement gap with hope for a meaningful future after people with disabilities age out of the school system. Part of our program includes a community garden and greenhouse that functions as a volunteer and educational environment for clients and the community during monthly learning events. Clients are excited to go to the garden and learn about the names of flowers, bugs, and butterflies. They love harvesting and giving away the fruits and vegetables to community visitors. Creative Enterprises donates most of the food grown in the garden to the community, volunteers, the Lawrenceville Foodbank, and Chef Hank’s Lettum Eat. We want to expand this service to the community by using sustainable agriculture practices to grow more produce and fruits to share with the community. The Creative Enterprises Community Garden is also home to one of 17 orchards planted as part of Food Well Alliance’s Orchard Project in partnership with the Giving Grove. The clients helped plant the trees throughout the garden, including elderberry trees, Jujubes, apple trees, muscadines, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries. Food Well is an amazing partner to Creative Enterprises that also includes their free orchard map on their website to guide our community to the garden for food. We would not have the amazing infrastructure we have without Food Well Alliance and Chef Hank. From our client’s perspective, all of their lives, people have been providing services for them. However, the roles reverse in Creative Enterprises’ garden where they can actually give back and they really like that. They light up and have such pride when they’re able to give things to people in the community. We want to give back to our community and neighbors like Hi-Hope and Grace’s Place who have invited us to visit anytime. 6
Organization: Families First, Inc.
Location: Atlanta
Project: Families First CHISPA “Spark” Supplemental Food Program
Amount Requested: $10,000
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: Families First requests funding for the Chispa program in Gwinnett County. The most recent American Community Survey (ACS) information released by the US Census Bureau reports that, in Norcross, 23.8% of the families with children under 6 live in poverty. One out of every four families does not have adequate housing or access to programs and services. The Chispa (“spark” in Spanish) program was started in 2003 and is a communitybased, early learning program serving low-income Hispanic families with children ages zero to five who are struggling with poverty, social isolation, family violence, mental illness, addiction, and crime. Utilizing the nationally recognized Parents as Teachers model, Chispa improves school outcomes for low-income children by providing early learning experiences. These experiences close the educational gap between low-income children at risk of poor school performance who are not enrolled in pre-K programs and their peers who are enrolled in pre-K programs. Families First provides services at two locations in Gwinnett County to reach families in poverty: the Norcross Atlanta Mobile Home Park off Buford Highway and the Stanford Village Apartments off Beaver Ruin Road. Providing access to programs and services through Chispa will improve families' daily lives in these isolated areas while increasing the developmental readiness of their children. The families we serve are often food insecure, but now, because of the recent inflation of food prices, they struggle to provide enough food for their children, especially during school breaks when the older siblings are home from school. This places additional financial stress on many families who need to provide breakfast and lunch during school summer or holiday breaks. Many of the families we serve cannot afford food and groceries. Families First seeks $10,000 to purchase food for low-income families in the Chispa Program. 100 families will receive a gift card of $100.00 to purchase food for their family. The gift cards will be provided when school children are home for school break and the family needs to have extra food in their homes.
Organization: Family Promise of Gwinnett County
Location: Lawrenceville
Project: Feeding Families at Promise Haven
Amount Requested: $5,000 (after receiving a grant from the Good2Give Fund)
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: Hunger and homelessness can happen to anyone. Everyone who lives paycheck to paycheck is susceptible. An unexpected expense can force a family to choose between food and rent. One hundred percent of the families we serve live paycheck to paycheck. At Promise Haven, Family Promise provides hot and nutritious meals to eat, a safe place to live, assistance with job readiness, and eventual placement into transitional living programs. There are dramatic disparities in personal income in Gwinnett County, and we are fully committed to helping families reinvigorate their personal, financial, and educational outcomes. At Promise Haven, we meet families' immediate need for food. Food is hope, and hope is the foundation for all things new. When we look at Gwinnett as a whole, we traditionally see a robust, economically diverse, and stable county where employers such as Publix, Walmart, Kroger, Primerica, and Home Depot employ 345,000+ workers. However, what we don’t see are the 68,650 food-insecure individuals who are under-employed, unemployed, single-mother households, seniors, and children.
Families living at Promise Haven for 30-90 days receive immediate food and housing assistance at no cost. Rotating volunteers from participating faith congregations provide a hot meal for dinner, supplies for breakfast, snacks, and lunch, and gracious hospitality throughout the week. It is well known that children experiencing homelessness are twice as likely as other children to experience hunger, to become sick with moderate to severe health problems, to repeat a grade, to be expelled, suspended, or to drop out of school, and fewer than 25% graduate from high school, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. By temporarily alleviating the financial burden associated with the cost of feeding their children, these families are afforded the opportunity and structure to learn to plan and save money that can serve as a safety net for them in the future. This approach helps families stabilize in the short term while also assisting them in creating stability for the long term. 8
Organization: Gwinnett Pearls of Service
Location: Lawrenceville
Project: Childhood Hunger Initiative
Amount Requested: $10,000.00
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: The project is to expand our existing hunger relief efforts. We offer a free supply of weekend meals and snacks to 75 to 100 underserved students at Rockbridge Elementary School in Norcross, GA, which has the highest free and reduced lunch rate in the county at 94%. The number of students in the program may change due to the school having a high transient population. Students are recommended by counselors, the parent center, administrators and teachers. Each Friday, students enrolled in the program receive an environmentally friendly bag filled with 2 breakfast, 2 lunch, and 2 snack items for their weekend meals. All food items are non-perishable. Holiday and extended breaks include food items for the days school is closed. Our dedicated volunteers fill the Power Packs and deliver them to the children every Friday. Funds from the Community Foundation of Northeast Georgia will allow us to increase our impact from 75 to over 150 students.
Organization: Helping Hands Ending Hunger (For Gwinnett schools)
Location: Trion
Project: Program Expansion, Capacity Enhancement and Capacity Building in Gwinnett County Schools
Amount Requested: $20,000
Counties Served: Gwinnett, Clayton, Cobb, De Kalb, Fulton
Project Description: This Gwinnett-based project will bring Helping Hands Ending Hunger (HHEH) programming into 3 new schools in Gwinnett Co. and help sustain existing programming in 2 Gwinnett Co. schools impacting a minimum of 250 families, 1,000 children and adults struggling with food security. Food is not trash; Food is medicine are guiding principles for HHEH's unique, school-based, studentled program operating around the state of Georgia since 2016 focused on addressing three critical issues impacting Georgians: food waste, food insecurity and food preventable chronic disease. Expressly reviewed and approved by the Dept. of Public Health and Dept. of Education/School Nutrition to rescue cold storage food (milk, cheese, yogurt, fruit, vegetables, etc.) along with dry packaged foods and channel it to children when they need the most, and providing weekly family meal bags filled with nutritious food and related educational resources, HHEH is volunteer based and run. A non-profit operating with strict food safety protocols, HHEH removes the risk of liability for food donations under established state and federal law. Further resolved to make significant differences in the quality of life for Georgians living with food insecurity, HHEH employs a “whole family” focus, while encouraging everyone at participating schools to dispel stigma, change school climates, and develop parent/caregiver engagement in better health and best outcomes. A partnership with the Atlanta Community Food Bank expands outreach and effectiveness with needed supplemental food for participating families. By incorporating nutrition, healthy living, and gardening connections along with STEAM learning, soft-skill development, CTAE pathway, and other relevant curriculum (preK12), HHEH strives to help students achieve their full human potential through education, stability, health, and well-being. HHEH encourages students to be ambassadors for change in their communities, learning about resourcefulness and the power of collective efforts, inspiring others to act. Building community partnerships in each district HHEH operates
program sustainability.
Organization: HomeStretch
Location: Roswell
Project: Food Insecurity
Amount Requested: $10,000
Counties Served: Fulton
Project Description: 100% of the adults in our supportive and affordable housing program are in need of training and certification to move closer to living wage income. As we are working with clients to increase their wages, a modest increase in income from $12 to $14 per hour is celebrated, however, in our effort to help clients increase wages to just $14 per hour a reduction in SNAPS and TANF is immediately triggered. Clients lose assistance of $700 - $800 dollars in food stamps, while their wage increase net a mere $80 per week. The sudden and unexpected decrease in SNAPS can wreak havoc on a family's budget. Although pay raises are necessary for the client to get to the next job level and work towards self sufficiency, they contemplate refusing the pay raises, not taking on more work and not wanting to advance their careers. Earning a living wage is a goal for transitioning. In two years, we alleviate the fear of advancing by providing gift cards for food, refilling our inhouse pantry of needed food items and connecting clients to food pantries so that they will have needed food items for their family. Each year we solicit funds to address the potential food insecurity issue the reduction may cause. Our supply will be depleted on or before April 1st.
Organization: Mercy Seed Resource Center
Location: Lilburn
Project: Mercy Seed Resource Center’s Fighting Food Insecurity Project
Amount Requested: $15,000
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: The Mercy Seed Resource Center’s Fighting Food Insecurity Project has provided services unofficially to the Lilburn community for nearly a decade. In 2022, our organization provided quality services to nearly 6,600 individuals and administered over 127,000 lbs. of food to families residing in under-resourced communities. Our program proposes to increase the number of individuals served by our program. We propose to serve 7,300 individuals and families facing food insecurity in Lilburn annually (approximately a 10% increase of 2022 numbers served). Currently, our food distribution operates one day per week for approximately 3 hours per week. Our plan is to expand these services by offering an additional 3 hours per week on a weeknight. The FFI Project provides nutritious and culturally diverse food options to individuals and families facing food insecurity. Our program partners with the Atlanta Community Food Bank and other partnering grocery stores to ensure a consistent supply of fresh and healthy produce and other perishable and non-perishable items. These services are offered weekly on Saturdays to the greater community of Lilburn, Georgia. As an enhancement to the program, we propose to expand our hours to meet the needs of first responders (medical, EMT, teachers etc.) that are not able to attend during our normal hours. We will offer an evening session during the week. Our organization utilizes the Oasis Insight Database to track the total number of families served by demographics and pounds of food provided on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This database is provided through our partnership with Atlanta Community Food Bank. Additionally, to increase our effectiveness, we propose to offer a comprehensive program that addresses food insecurity with health education, nutrition education and fitness education. We will provide these services with community partners and other services provided by New Mercies Christian Church.
Organization: North Gwinnett Cooperative
Location: Buford
Project: North Gwinnett Co-Op Food Program
Amount Requested: $10,000 (after receiving a grant from the Good2Give Fund) Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: Through the Food Program, The Co-Op distributes two to three bags of groceries each week for families in need in the Gwinnett community. These groceries include fresh fruits and vegetables, juice, meat, and other fresh products. The Co-Op works with Gwinnett County and Buford City Public School Systems to identify and advertise to families who may need this service. We also utilize two mobile food pantries at least once a month. The Mobile Food Pantries are essential for the Food Program. The pantries deliver food to families who lack transportation living in mobile home communities in the Gwinnett area. The Mobile Food Pantries have served more than 10,000 additional clients annually. Each family receives four bags of free nutritious groceries every two weeks during the summer and holidays. There has also been an uptick in the number of families who speak English as a second language requesting services. In response, the hours of bilingual staff have been increased to help with communication with Spanish-speaking clients. The Co-Op has set up an account with several major food distributors to purchase enough food to meet the demand at a lower cost. The greatest need facing the Co-Op is purchasing food to be distributed to low-income families in the Gwinnett area. The Co-Op is requesting $30,000 to help purchase food from our discount distributors to supply the food pantry and the Mobile Food Pantry to ensure food-insecure children, families, and seniors can receive the nourishment they need. We will be providing families with school-age children and seniors extra food for Spring Break, Easter Break, Summer Break, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The Co-Op tracks success based on the program's success measures, including the pounds of food distributed and the number of individuals served. In 2023, we distributed 609,477 pounds to 36,408 people. 972 of the households we served had never sought help before 2023. 13
Organization: Pebble Tossers
Location: Dunwoody
Project: Food Insecurity Service Projects
Amount Requested: $10,000
Counties Served: Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, De Kalb, Decatur, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Hall, Paulding
Project Description: Pebble Tossers, Atlanta's leading youth development nonprofit, equips and empowers youth through service. They unite youth from all backgrounds with volunteer opportunities, fostering leadership and positive community change. Pebble Tossers streamlines the volunteer experience with online resources for finding projects with 65 vetted nonprofit organizations covering 12 cause areas and for tracking service hours. Programming includes weekly community service projects and leadership development workshops utilizing a unique service-learning curriculum incorporating social-emotional learning, Positive Psychology, and social justice to help youth serve, lead, and succeed.
Pebble Tossers offers Food Insecurity Service Projects that assist those fighting food insecurity and directly benefit our nonprofit partnerships with the mission of hunger. Some of the nonprofit partners and service projects are as follows:
• Meals By Grace: Meal program helping feed children and their families primarily in Forsyth and Dawson Counties. Volunteers help pack and deliver food boxes to families and work in the food pantry.
• Open Hand Atlanta - Trained volunteers prepare, pack, and deliver meals to Open Hand clients throughout metro Atlanta.
• Agape Way - Volunteers serve breakfast to community members in need and those experiencing homelessness. Volunteers also give out seasonal items, hygiene kits, and clothing.
• The Sandwich Project - Volunteers assemble and distribute sandwiches and food kits to organizations that feed those experiencing homelessness and food-insecure families in the Atlanta metro area.
• Atlanta Ronald McDonald House Charities and CHOA - Volunteers prepare and serve meals, snack kits, and plan enrichment activities for their patients and families.
Additional Pebble Tossers nonprofit partners: Atlanta Community Food Bank, Food Well Alliance, HOPE Atlanta, Intown Collaborative Ministries, Malachi’s Storehouse, SatisFEED, and Neighborhood
Ministries.
Organization: Special Needs Schools of Gwinnett
Location: Lawrenceville
Project: Healthy Students & Young Adults
Amount Requested: $10,000
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: This effort will specifically address the growing levels of food insecurity and lack of nutritious options we are experiencing throughout our students and young adults. By providing supplemental options we will ensure that, while in our care, students are well fed and have the proper foundation for learning and overall health. In our adult program we’ll utilize our kitchen to help teach the importance of nutrition and healthy cooking to create lifelong habits that will benefit them in many ways.
Organization: Team Up Mentoring, Inc.
Location: Monroe
Project: Summer Food Program
Amount Requested: $9,450
Counties Served: Barrow, Walton
Project Description: Team Up Mentoring serves children and teens in Walton and Barrow Counties who experience a lack of regular access to affordable and nutritious food. Team Up’s headquarters are in Monroe, Georgia, a food desert region with a 33% poverty rate. Here, almost two in three children live in poverty, double the Georgia average. Food insecurity is found to affect lower-income, female-headed, and non-white households with children at disproportionate rates. Team Up clients are 95% low income, 78% single-female households, and 84% African-American and 5% Multiracial. Team Up plans to offer home-cooked meals as part of its 2024 Summer Camp program to increase youth access to healthy and consistent meals, teach skills for healthy eating, offer wraparound services to improve child and community resilience, and improve health outcomes for children and families with some of the lowest access to healthy eating in this part of Georgia. The Summer Food Program will offer breakfast, lunch, and healthy snacks to 60 youth as part of summer camp programming this June and July. Meals are essential to making kids feel safe at Team Up. As trauma survivors, it takes time for kids to trust that Team Up cares about their needs. Team Up provides meals not just to help with their energy levels and wellbeing, but because every plate is an opportunity to make a child feel safe and loved. Educating children about healthy eating can have a ripple effect as children influence adult eating habits in their households. The Summer Food Program will equip mentors and staff who already have trusted relationships with children in the program, to introduce meals that are fun, accessible, and healthy that even elementary-aged children can try at home. Team Up will offer warm, home-cooked, nutrition-dense breakfast and lunch to 60 campers 3 days per week for seven weeks of the summer, and engage in experiential learning connected to food including gardening and cooking classes.
Organization: The Block Community Outreach
Location: Sugar Hill
Project: Weekend Food Program
Amount Requested: $10,800
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: We are committed to helping reduce food insecurity in Buford/Sugar Hill through our Weekend Food Program. Over the course of the school year, we provide weekly free grocery bags, containing shelf-stable goods and fresh produce, to more than 140 families in a two-mile radius of our office. We seek to make these bags culturally appropriate for our largely Hispanic client base. To this end, we endeavor to be intentional about food selection, whether that be the type of produce we purchase or the brand of items we buy. Additionally, we try to keep the bags nutritionally balanced by providing a mix of proteins, carbohydrates, and pantry staples, such as flour, sugar, and spices. These bags are intended to help feed families over the weekend when their children do not receive free or reduced cost school meals. The Weekend Food Program bags are hand delivered to our clients’ homes; this is responsive to our clients’ needs since they may not have cars or gas money. During deliveries, The Block volunteers also build relationships with our clients, allowing them to truly “encounter and know the other” and build community. During school breaks and summer vacation, we also provide food assistance, only in greater quantity per family.
Organization: The Place
Location: Cumming
Project: Homebound Seniors: Supplementary Home Needs
Amount Requested: $15,000
Counties Served: Dawson, Forsyth
Project Description: The Place recognizes the barriers faced by homeless and underserved families to food security, healthy eating habits, and healthy food choices. We mitigate these barriers by offering our Client Choice Food Pantry Program. This program is an access point to healthier food options for lowincome families and individuals who are facing food insecurity. This year, we are focusing on providing homebound seniors with supplemental support pantry needs in both Forsyth and Dawson Counties. The seniors in our community are living on a limited (fixed) income; which is far less than cost of living. Each month, we require $3,000 to support supplemental food and other necessary items for seniors. These supplementary items include, but are not limited to: paper goods, pet food, cleaning supplies and other items that we do not have in our regular pantry. This support allows them to offset other costs that they may have; such as rent, utility bills, and medical expenses. Our supplementary support is also helpful for seniors with health issues and dietary restrictions. With your generous support, we can help change the lives of homebound seniors and strengthen our community.
Organization: The Quinn House
Location: Lawrenceville
Project: "Supplying, Sharing, Spreading the Food and Love" with families, seniors and homeless individuals.
Amount Requested: $15,000
Counties Served: Gwinnett
Project Description: “Supplying, Sharing, Spreading the Food and Love" is a project designed to combat the ever-growing issue of food insecurity directly by providing immediate food relief to the residents of our local Gwinnett County. In 2022, household food insecurity affected 17.3% (6.4 million) of households nationwide with children, and in some of these food-insecure households, only adults were food insecure, while in other households, children also experienced food insecurity. Food insecurity is particularly prevalent among low-income families with children, with nearly 35% of households with children and incomes below 185% of the federal poverty level being food insecure in 2017. These numbers have been steadily increasing leading to a massive need for food relief across our nation. We propose this grant to put for the funds to purchase a variety of canned and dry goods. Using our specific connections we can stretch this money to purchase food in bulk and ensure this money goes far further than the average person spending money and donating the food directly to us. Purchasing these food items also allows us the flexibility to not have to be concerned with refrigeration and we will then be able to store more efficiently and in greater quantities. Having these funds also allows us to more accurately allocate our resources throughout the year whereas normally food donation amounts and times can fluctuate greatly.