Community Food Bank of So AZ

Health and Food Programs: Our Health & Food initiatives are broad efforts to increase access to healthy and culturally-relevant foods in order to prevent negative health outcomes and to strengthen regional food systems. We continued food distribution efforts at our Resource Centers, mobile distributions, and through our network of 250+ partner agencies across our 5-county service area of Cochise, Graham, Greenlee, Pima, and Santa Cruz Counties. In June 2023, in response to growing community needs, we extended our service hours at our Tucson location, now offering expanded services on Thursdays and including one Saturday each month. We also returned to a client choice model in our Green Valley location. 548,043 meals were distributed to seniors and our community through our Caridad Community Kitchen and we reached a total of 2 million meals served through Senior Meals and 1 million meals served through Community meals to date. 160,492 (TEFAP) and 89,463 (CSFP) unique individuals were served through our two major USDA programs: The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP). These figures now exceed the level of service provided before the pandemic for these programs. Health disparities can largely be attributed to unequal access to healthy foods, in which socio-economic factors such as race, gender, income, and location of residence play a role. For food insecure populations, lack of access to healthy food often results in a wide variety of negative health outcomes like increased incidence and prevalence of diabetes, poor management of certain behavioral conditions, and social isolation. Our health and food efforts work across our service area to provide nutritious, culturally relevant foods to those who are experiencing hunger and adverse health outcomes. Our community health care partnerships help advance regional policy and have the potential to inform national policy.

Educational Programs: We believe resources and opportunities are inequitably distributed between communities, and that education can help build a bridge out of poverty toward improved socio-economic conditions. As we came out of the pandemic, we continued to offer some of our training virtually, while moving towards in-person training. We offered 6 virtual trainings on gardening and 18 in person trainings through our farm and garden programs promoting environmental stewardship and social connection through the facilitation of skill building, engagement, career readiness, and leadership development. Through various projects like our Farm to Child, school pantries, Health & Nutrition, we trained 2,000 K - 12 students in nutrition through classes and gardening. We provided 1,517 hours of skills and leadership education to individuals and organizations across our service area, and Caridad Community Kitchen provided 7,200 hours in culinary training to 24 students. All our efforts are grounded in the principles of cultural relevancy, self-determination, and social inclusion.

Community Development Programs: We believe hunger and poverty are outcomes of broader systems and local policies that create a sense of powerlessness, resource inequity, and issues of under or over representation. Our community development work focuses on groups, organizations, and governments to create opportunities for change in these systems. We use initiatives that increase the capacity, engagement, and self-determination of community members and organizations to determine, enact, and sustain solutions to systemic problems and local issues. In the past fiscal year, we gave over $2.2 million in monetary grants to 66 partner organizations for projects to maintain or improve services, train and educate, build community, address disparities with dignity, and change the conditions that cause food insecurity and poverty in line with CFB's mission to build healthy, hunger-free communities. We engaged 850 people in community-building events and training at Las Milpitas Community Farm and over 300 people at Nuestra Tierra Garden. We supported the development of two new neighborhood coalitions in our rural communities of Cochise and Santa Cruz Counties, created to develop advocates' capacity to engage with their representatives and to improve the material conditions of their communities. Forty-two (42%) percent of the $208,000 direct-to-consumer sales generated at the Santa Cruz River Farmers Market were in Public Assistance benefits including SNAP/food stamps, Double-Up Food Bucks (SNAP-match), and Farmers' Market Nutrition Program coupons for low-income older adults and families with children. We convened the Farm-to-Institution Value Chain initiative to continue building institutional markets for local farm products, making more than $300,000 in pre-season contracts with local farmers and facilitating sales to 5 additional Institutional Buyers. Through funding, technical assistance, and leadership development, we help to build resilient groups that are better able to weather storms and maintain healthy communities as new leaders develop and new needs arise.