Posts Tagged ‘food pantries’

Posted by Caitlin Krieck | August 13th, 2010

[Cross-posted from Beyond Bread]

Communities east of the Anacostia River suffer from an infamous shortage of grocery stores, and here at Bread for the City we’re doing our part to counteract that lack: we’ve made our food pantry a lot more like the shopping experience.

We’ve previewed this new project on Beyond Bread before: in A Week of Choice, food pantry coordinator Jeffrey Wankel told you that, “after two successful dry-runs, Client Choice…went live for an entire week at our Southeast Center,” teaching us all a very important lesson. “Our clients love the ability to choose what food they receive from our pantry. This alone makes it a priority for us to implement Client Choice as a permanent feature of our food program.”

So we’re pleased to report that the Southeast pantry is now all Client Choice all the time–to the rave reviews of clients, staff and volunteers.

According to Food Coordinator Tony Weldon, the Client Choice program “sets us apart from a church basement, or something like that, even just with the visual effect,” he explains.

The pantry now boasts new shelving units and a layout that is carefully constructed to guide clients through the array of options. After a few months of tweaking, Jeff is proud to note that the “cycle time” (i.e., the average length of each client’s time checking in and receiving their bags) is now comparable to the previous system.

Most of all, the clients love it. “This is their words,” Tony said: “‘Wow! Ya’ll stepped your game up!”

Another positive side-effect of this new system: volunteers and clients actually get to know each other. “Client choice has opened the lines of communication..and there is noticeably more constructive feedback.” Volunteers are able to learn more about the clients they serve, and clients enjoy seeing familiar faces month after month.

Meanwhile, Client Choice has made our staff less busy. That may seem counterintuitive, since there are more decisions being made with every single bag we give out. And yet, prior to Choice, Tony and his food pantry staff were responsible not only for distributing bags to clients, but also for supervising the volunteers who stuffed bags. Managing both sides — on top of the day-to-day logistics of orders and deliveries and so on — stretched pantry staff to their limits. With Client Choice, clients pack their own bags, while volunteers guide them from station to station. It’s all one process. Tony and his staff still oversee pantry operations, but they’re left with more time to chat with clients, get to know volunteers, and tinker with big-picture aspects of the system.

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | March 4th, 2010

Most days, clients of Bread for the City’s pantry take a number, wait their turn, and receive a standard bag of pre-packaged groceries. These bags are carefully balanced to provide a rounded set of food items – canned fruit and vegetables, a packet of rice, a meat item, etc, in proportion with the size of a client’s family. Recently, however, we started to change things up a bit.

In the past few years, as part of our mission to serve and care for people in an atmosphere of dignity and respect, we’ve overhauled our pantry menu to feature an array of more nutritious items. The results of that Nutrition Initiative were really positive: healthier diets and higher client satisfaction.

Now we are experimenting with pantry innovation once again: exploring opportunities to enable client choice in our pantry menu. We envision a food pantry in which people can select which food they bring home, just like they would at a grocery store.

To be sure, this would be a logistical challenge. But there’s quite a few reasons why client choice would be an effective process. For one, Bread for the City is not the only source of food for our clients; many clients may already have sufficient amounts of certain kinds of food, but may be in greater need of others. Some of our clients have special dietary needs that make certain foods especially important, and others not helpful at all. And most of all, as our nutrition consultant Sharon Gruber says: “one of the things that is most debilitating about a low-income lifestyle is a lack of control, and food is one of the most basic things that we can or cannot control in our lives.”