| Neighborhood FOOD Program |
The Food Bank works with the Center for People in Need to sponsor mobile pantries at five sites per week in Lincoln. This program, called Neighborhood FOOD, is held at community gathering places in some of Lincoln’s poorest areas and currently serves approximately 1,300 families per week. On the best of weeks, families take home an assortment of canned food, dry goods such as boxed dinners, frozen meat, salvaged produce and baked goods, and occasional personal care items. These items can serve as valuable income extenders for struggling households.
Neighborhood FOOD sites: F Street Recreation Center, Matt Talbot Kitchen & Outreach, Center for People in Need, Malone Community Center, and Oak Lake Evangelical Free Church.
Click here for a complete Neighborhood FOOD schedule
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| BackPack Program |
The BackPack Program provides backpacks filled with food to students in need of food over the weekend. The program primarily targets students who qualify for their school’s Free Lunch Program. Many of these students rely on their school’s breakfasts and lunches for their most nutritious meals of the day. In some cases, these are their only meals of the day. These students are then faced with a food crisis over the weekend. The BackPack Program is a way to help these students and their families until students return to school on Monday. Currently, the BackPack Program sends 2,066 backpacks home to students on Friday afternoons in 22 Lincoln Public Schools, 4 Lincoln Catholic schools and 12 rural communities in southeast Nebraska.
Click here for more information on the BackPack Program |
| Housewarming Project |
The Food Bank of Lincoln introduced the Housewarming Project in 2005 with three pilot agencies: Friendship Home, Fresh Start, and St Monicas. The Food Bank invited women moving out of these shelters into their own households to come to the Food Bank with their social worker to shop for 100 pounds of groceries. The Housewarming shoppers would also receive bags of household necessities such as paper goods, cleaning supplies, and laundry items.
In 2009, the Food Bank extended the Housewarming Project to include six additional agencies, also opening the program to male clients as well as women. This expansion was due in large part to the strong support for the program from the summer Campaign Against Hunger drives, with companies making special efforts to collect items that make up the Housewarming bags.
In five years, 327 housewarming shoppers and over 480 additional family members have been served by the Housewarming Project.
Housewarming Agencies: Friendship Home, Fresh Start, St Monicas, Cornhusker Place, CenterPointe, House for New Life, Peoples City Mission, Matt Talbot Kitchen & Outreach, and Lincoln Action Program.
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| Beatrice Mobile Pantry |
The Food Bank of Lincoln cooperates with member agencies in several rural communities to sponsor mobile pantries at local sites. Every month the Food Bank takes a truckload of food to the Salvation Army in Beatrice, where volunteers from three local pantries pitch in to distribute supplies to families. People begin lining up with carts and bags early in the day for the noontime distribution, which has grown to over 200 families each month.
Click here for a complete distribution schedule
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| CSS Mobile Pantries |
The Food Bank also works with Catholic Social Services of Southern Nebraska to hold mobile pantries in 11 communities in our common service area. Distribution takes place every three months on a rotating basis at a variety of sites including a Knights of Columbus Hall, the 4-H building at a county fairground, a National Guard Armory, and several Catholic parish halls. The small towns where CSS mobile pantries take place have relatively few avenues of assistance for families in need and the three months between visits to a community can be a long time to wait for supplemental food.
CSS mobile pantry sites: Falls City, Wahoo, Tecumseh, Crete, David City, Auburn, Hebron, Fairbury, Ashland, Seward, and Geneva.
Click here for a complete distribution schedule
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| Pre-packed bag distribution |
The Food Bank delivers bags of grocery staples to Community Action Programs in underserved counties on a monthly basis. The bags are made up primarily of government commodity vegetables, fruits, proteins, cereals and juices, which can be quickly and easily distributed to families by program staff, which are struggling to meet increasing requests for assistance in this difficult economy.
Bag distribution to: Lincoln Action Program of Saunders County; Southeast Nebraska Community Action of Richardson and Nemaha Counties; and Blue Valley Community Action of Jefferson, Fillmore, Thayer, Butler, Polk, and Saline Counties.
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