The Hunger Stories: Jewish Family Services/University Food Bank

        Yesterday, a beautiful rainy day in Seattle, I toured two very different food banks. First, I walked to Jewish Family Services, a very small, very beautiful food bank on Capitol Hill. The first thing one notices about the JFS food bank is its beauty. This is a tidy, newly built and well run little food bank. I worked the morning shift at JFS from 9:45 to 12:00. During this time, JFS served roughly 55 clients. Unlike at Saint Mary's and Cherry Street, JFS had no long line or disorderly operations. Instead, clients arrived every few minutes when their buses dropped them off across the street, waited in the entryway until they were called into the bank, and picked up their cans, lovely produce, and bread while chatting and laughing with the volunteers. I was surprised to find that clients could point or ask about various things on the warehouse shelves, such as razors, coffee, baby food, and cookies, and volunteers would happily accommodate their requests. At most food banks, such requests would be met with a, "we're sorry, we can't give you that item at this time." Additionally, JFS had the most beautiful produce I have ever seen at a food bank. They had fresh blueberries, boxes of apples and oranges, and big heads of lettuce. At most food banks, a client would be limited to one or two apples, oranges, and potatoes. At JFS, they receives eight of each. In conclusion, JFS is an incredibly well run and well stocked food bank, but it has the ability to carry such nice produce and give away items like razors and cookies because it is so small and clients come so infrequently. JFS can't compare to the large scales of Cherry Street and Saint Mary's, but it has its place in the city's framework of food banks.
           Next, I headed to the University of Washington campus to take a look at the innovative University Food Bank. Instead of a traditional grocery line, where clients walk around a horseshoe-shaped configuration and choose various items from bins, UFood has a marketplace structure. On their first visit, clients are asked to bring proof of the number of people in their family. Depending on the size of their family, they are allotted a certain number of points. Then, customers (they call them customers, not clients) are free to roam the aisles of the food bank and spend their points on the items they want. I thought this was a really interesting style and it certainly seemed to be working when I observed the food bank. Not only does it increase the amount of food each family receives, it allows the food bank to stay open for five hours each day, Monday through Friday. In total, UFood serves around 6,500 families each week. Each family is only allowed to come once per week. UFood does more data tracking than the previous food banks that I visited, and they had some interesting numbers. They found that, not only did the recession cause a major spike in the number of people, it caused the average length of time that a person or family utilizes the food bank to increase from three to four months to ten to twelve months. Between 1/4 and 1/3 of UFood's customers attend one or more of the other twenty-six food banks in Seattle. Between seventy and eighty percent of customers come via the bus, on a bike, or on foot. Finally, fifteen percent of their clients are homeless.
           UFood requires between fifteen and twenty volunteers each day and they logged 20,000 volunteer hours last year. Of the roughly eighty volunteers each week, roughly one quarter are customers who want to give back. Eighty percent of UFood's food is donated by grocery stores, Northwest Harvest, Food Lifeline, and community drives. The bank then spends roughly $130,000 per year purchasing food and has a total operating expense of $475,000 per year, double what it was ten years ago. The money to fund these expenses come from individuals, churches, the government, and foundations.