Fresh and Frozen Food Distribution Program

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a very Happy New Year and offer our hope that this will be a year of wishes come true and dreams realized for you and yours.  We are excited at St. Vincent de Paul because the New Year brings with it the long awaited expansion of one of our most important and necessary programs.  With the installation of a new commercial sized refrigerator freezer at the Chamblee location, we will now be able to increase our capacity for distribution of fresh and frozen food to our 38 food pantries in North and Middle Georgia.

The story behind this program is a great lesson in how SVdP Atlanta is working with community partners and business in helping alleviate hunger and need in Georgia.  This program will allow us to increase by ten-fold and more the amount of high quality meat, protein, fruit, and vegetables that we supply to our food pantries and that they provide to people in need locally.

In early spring, Kroger approached SVdP about accepting large monthly donations of meat and other perishable foods. While we at SVdP Atlanta were excited to have the opportunity to enter into this new partnership so that we could expand the selection and nutritional quality of the food offered to the thousands of people we serve each year through its food pantries, we knew that the project would require us to acquire freezers for each of our participating SVdP local food pantries, as well as, a large industrial sized unit at our central distribution location.   We also knew that the volume of food and the logistics of getting it to the local food pantries would require us to obtain another refrigerated truck to assist with distributing the food to outlying areas.

So our team went to work and began contacting benefactors and foundations to support our efforts to raise $150,000 to kick off the program.  And today, on this first week of the New Year, I am pleased to be able to tell you that SVdP has raised more than $100,000 of that money. Through grants and gifts from the Cox Foundation, Georgia Power, The Catholic Foundation of North Georgia, the Helen & Marian Woodward Fund, the Allen Lindsey Branan Foundation and other funds raised from the SVdP’s benefiting partnership with the Atlanta Community Food Bank’s Hunger Walk/Run, we were able to purchase and install the new commercial freezer in late December 2010. 
  
The launch of the program moves SVdP closer to our vision of a new distribution model with several more facilities throughout North and Central Georgia. By collaborating with Kroger, SVdP will be able to provide as much as 20,000 lbs of perishable foods to clients each month. That is 10 tons a month, 120 tons or 240,000lbs of food each year. Our other existing partnerships with Whole Foods, Panera Bread, and Publix will add to the amount of perishable food SVdP will have available for those in need.

As we move further into 2011, we are committed to maintaining the work and programs that support our mission while we develop new and different ways to approach and manage them. We hope your new year is filled with similar opportunity and that you will continue to follow our progress and support our efforts.  


Sincerely,
John