Greater Vail Community Resources

Food bank: operates a emergency food program which provides weekly food, ensuring families have healthy nutrition. The program serves the low income, the homebound seniors, individuals,families and students struggling with financial hardship. This includes monthly food and holiday boxes, as well as supplemental food items, diapers and personal hygiene items. In 2023 279 volunteers donated their time to the food bank for the following programs, and volunteer hours given to make the food programs possible amounted to 9,983programs:emergency food program: provides access to weekly food, ensuring families have healthy nutrition. The program served 6,609, 1,390 unique households and 5,519 unique individual clients. Food is rescued from five local grocery stores six days per week with a monthly average of 20,000 pounds of food made available to our food bank clients. The food bank also receives donations of food from individuals as well as cash donations to help supplement additional food for the program.homebound senior meal boxes: this program benefits homebound, physically challenged or convalescent individuals providing balanced supplemental nutrition that is not carb or sodium heavy. Each week weekly food boxes are delivered by volunteers to twenty homebound clients. The meals provide healthy and easily prepared food and also gives the volunteers an opportunity to check on the wellbeing of the clients. Backpack program: weekly food bags provide children with nutritional support over the weekend. The program grew 46% in 2023 serving 429 students. Each week volunteers along students from the Vail unified school districts handicapped work program, transition from school to work(tsw) fill and deliver bags of food, while school is in session, to students in need. The program is designed to provide an average of 1,600 calories and 62 grams of protein to students that may fall short on the weekends. Students who qualify for the free and reduced lunch program are referred to Resources by the student service coordinator (ssc) at each school. There are 27 schools in the Vail unified school district. Meals for unaccompanied youth (a new program in 2023): 12 teens were provided weekly food bags that can be prepared easily by teens living on their own. Holiday meal boxes: provided families with the extra food needed to celbrate the holidays in november and december. In 2023 516 households were served which was a 17% increase from 2022. Thrift store: the Vail unified school districts student service coordinator, identifies students who are in need of clothing. The students are given a voucher to use to shop at the store for clothing. In 2023 $16,647 (thrift store value pricing) worth of clothing was given to these needy students. 85 volunteers worked a total of 8,460 hours in 2023.