Northern Illinois Food Bank

Like most organizations we've faced many challenges this past year. From inflation and rising Food prices to supply chain challenges and great economic uncertainty. But through it all, our team at the Food Bank has focused on evolving, adapting and growing to better serve our community by living out our strategic plan unite. We're empowering our neighbors experiencing Food insecurity by designing with them for better choice, better access and less stigma. For years it's been important to provide Food choices to our neighbors, allowing them the dignity to shop for their groceries as we all do. Now, as we think about choice and empowerment, we strive to provide choice in how neighbors might access Food as well. Through our spectrum of programs, neighbors can choose to shop at a pantry, drive through pick up at a pantry or mobile market, order online for pick-up or delivery and call, text or chat online with our team for help with snap benefits.we're evolving the Food Bank, becoming stronger and more adaptable while growing community support and awareness of Food insecurity throughout our 13 counties. This year we welcomed 17,000 unique volunteers who donated an incredible 130,000 hours of their time. We raised $30m in contributed revenue from our many generous donors to further our mission. We moved our distribution center from park city to a larger facility in lake forest to better serve our neighbors, member agencies and accommodate more volunteers.we're embracing diversity, equity and inclusion in a deeper way in all our work. We're addressing inequalities in our communities and raising awareness of the disproportionate rate of Food insecurity on households of color. This year we launched an internal dei committee and a board dei committee. We formalized a dei statement to help guide our strategies and offered monthly trainings. To further increase diversity within our stakeholder groups we surveyed our leadership volunteer committees and set goals around proactive outreach to engage underrepresented demographics. We continue to add diverse and desired foods to our shopping list and make decisions around which foods to distribute at mobile markets based on the demographics of the communities we serve. We're engaging our network to increase access to Food and advance neighbor-centric practices with our 900 agencies and feeding programs. The Food Bank served an average of 375k neighbors each month, but we didn't do this alone. It was accomplished together, through the hard work and dedication of our network of Food pantries, soup kitchens, and mobile market sites. Our partnerships with child and senior programs also provided 1.9m meals. Working together we're improving the experience for our neighbors seeking help by creating more community partnerships, offering training and development opportunities, and providing $1.2m in capacity building grants. As we look ahead to this next year, we know the challenges are real. But we will continue to innovate and advocate to help everyone in Northern Illinois have access to the Food they need to thrive.