Visit the warehouse Monday mornings, and you will also see donation preparations on pallets to be picked up by Emergency Foodshelf Network (EFN) pickup. Food that is not selling as planned, or food that is approaching its best buy date, is offered to employees in the company store at discount. The items that don’t sell in the employee store are donated to local food shelves through EFN.

Food donated includes everything from organic salads to cheeses, breads, hummus, frozen meats and produce. Since initiating their partnership with EFN in March to streamline their giving, Coborn’s Delivers has provided over 30,000 lbs. of food to local food shelves, that’s enough food for 25,000 individual meals.

Take a tour of Coborn’s delivers via their You Tube channel.

See the rest of the photos in our facebook photo album.

The annual event is about recognizing agency and program partners and volunteers for their hard work. Many guests have been working for decades to provide communities in the Twin Cities with food, so at times, the picnic almost feels like a reunion of sorts. Representatives from the 80+ food shelves gathered with volunteers, Fare For All site leaders, board members and staff.

Each year, Emergency Foodshelf Network (EFN) honors select agency and program partners and volunteers for their outstanding work. It is not an easy task, but here are the recipients from this year’s celebration:

Gen Krause, Pat Sackett, and Stacy Marchese:    Outstanding Volunteer
Elliot Twins Buildings:   Outstanding Mobile Foodshelf Partner
Eagan:   Outstanding Fare For All Traditional Site
Stillwater:   Outstanding Fare For All Express Site
Valley Outreach:  Outstanding Partner Agency
CAER:  Outstanding New Partner Agency
Produce Program, Waite House and Northeast Community Lutheran:   Outstanding Innovation by a Partner Agency

Special recognition for those who donate raffle prizes or helped cut costs by donating or providing their services at a very reasonable rate.

Best Wishes Floral
Catered by Colette
Fare For All
James Barton Photography
Jennifer Nagel
Organic Valley
Renaissance Festival
Rocket Crane
The Cookie Cart
Warners’ Stellian

This free event, organized by Twin Cities food co-ops and local farmers, gives people the opportunity to visit sustainable Minnesota farms to see where their local food is grown and meet the farmers behind it all. This is a great opportunity for you to visit some Harvest for the Hungry farm partners!

HFTH farm partners offering tours:

• Big River Farm
• Women’s Environmental Institute
• East Henderson Farm
• Living Land Farm
• Riverbend Farm

The hours that each farm is open for visitors varies and some offer guided tours at specific times.

Have a look at the tour schedule for more details!

http://msmarket.coop/files/FarmTourGuidebookForWebsite.pdf

For more information about the tour visit the Mississippi Market website:

http://msmarket.coop/news/eat-local-farm-tour/

Jody and Charlie are experimenting the first year of their garden by planting a variety of fruits and vegetables to see what grows well. They look forward to teaching their growing family (they have a two year old and a four-and-a-half year old) about growing their own food.

Jody, Charlie, and the New Hope community garden is part of a growing trend. According to the Garden Writers Association, vegetable gardening is up 20 percent and community gardens have increased 60 percent over last year.

This year is the first growing season that the community garden is in EFN’s front yard. The garden was developed and is run by Hope Grows, a community-based organization, with a volunteer board and sponsored by the city of New Hope. Funding from Active Living Hennepin County and Statewide Health Improvement Program (SHIP) helped the garden get started. EFN is leasing the land to Hope Grows for $1 a month.

The garden includes 24 individual plots adopted by community residents and six communal plots adopted by organizations and groups. The communal plots are dedicating half of the fresh fruits and vegetables for programs at EFN and other non-profit organizations. The price for a plot, which measures about 10 feet by 12 feet, was $20 for the growing season.

Learn about other EFN partnerships that are working to deliver more produce to neighbors in need.

Thanks to the generous gifts of CSA members and other donors in the community, so far in 2011 Harvest for the Hungry (HFTH) has been able to raise a total of $11,506.43 to purchase fresh local CSA produce for Minnesota food shelves.

This amount will be doubled when each dollar is matched by contributions from FINNEGANS Irish Amber and Wedge Co-op, making a total of $23,012.86 available to purchase excess produce from HFTH farm partners. That means 23, 013 lbs of produce will make it to local food shelves so that hungry families will be given the opportunity to make healthy meals this summer.

And we’ve only just begun! Harvest for the Hungry will be accepting donations all summer long that will be doubled and used to get nutritious produce into the food shelves that serve our communities in need.

In 2010 alone, there were more than three million food shelf visits statewide and 63 million pounds of food were distributed to Minnesota families by food shelves.* With your help we can make fresh produce a bigger part of the emergency food available for Minnesotans facing hunger.

*Statistic taken from MN Food Share Hunger Fact Sheet 2011                        http://mnfoodshare.gmcc.org/docs/mfs_hunger_fact_sheet_2011.pdf

Aaron Blyth, Manager and CSA Marketing Coordinator of Big River Farms, gave a tour of the farm and talked with the group about the Minnesota Food Association (MFA), of which Big River Farms is a part. Being a part of the MFA, with a mission to build a more sustainable food system with sustainable food producers, the CSA program of Big River Farms operates in conjunction with an immigrant and minority farmer training program. The training program gives aspiring farmers the skills they need to become sustainable growers while supporting a healthy community through the CSA program and partnership with HFTH.

Learn more about Big River Farms and the MFA: mnfoodassociation.org

The first quarter: bowling! Thanks to New Hope Bowl for letting us take over their bowling alley for the afternoon. And special congrats to Tom Mercer, with high score, Reuben George, with most strikes score, and Katie Wahl, with most unique bowling style.

Maybe it’s golf, maybe it’s bowling, or maybe it’s a pot luck luncheon, it is all part of employee engagement. According to findings from Gallup, only 31 percent of employees are engaged in their jobs. Employee engagement is supported through many elements:  getting to do what you do best every day, receiving the materials and equipment necessary to do your job, and feeling that your opinion counts.

Knowing that someone cares about you can make the difference between being an active, engaged employee or someone who just collects a paycheck. Taking the afternoon for some fun to throw a few strikes (or a few gutter balls, depending on the skill level) definitely says, “We value you.”

How does your organization show it cares? Maybe you could be the one to initiate a team building activity?

EFN is a great option for organizations seeking team building volunteer opportunities. Every day volunteer groups get out of the office, build a strong team, and help EFN’s operation by packing and sorting food for the Twin Cities community. Volunteering shows employees that the organization values time together but also values giving back to the community.

After all, Gallup has proven that companies with world-class engagement have 3.9 times the growth rate compared with companies with lower engagement in their same industry.

 Contact EFN’s volunteer coordinator  for more information and if interested in volunteer opportunities.

Harvest for the Hungry (HFTH) offers a great opportunity for community members to play a role in local hunger relief while also supporting local food producers. With the majority of program donations coming from members of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms that partner with the program, HFTH supporters are often very familiar with the individuals who grow the produce that is given to partnering food shelves. But how much do we know about the food shelves receiving HFTH produce?

A visit was recently payed to Groveland Food Shelf in South Minneapolis to find out more about the needs of clients visiting HFTH partner food shelves and the impact that the program has on the food assistance that partnering food shelves are able to offer.

Groveland Food Shelf serves an astounding average of 2,000 individuals and families each month, increasingly comprised of immigrant populations, such as Somali, to whom the community is home. 15 times per year individuals in the service area of the food shelf are able to receive a three day supply of emergency food to supplement the bare cupboards that they and their families may otherwise face.

The food shelf operates under a client choice model that allows visitors to make their own selections when receiving food and distributes food that comes from government food assistance programs, the Emergency Foodshelf Network, various individual donations, and the Minnesota based program Hope for the City. Most food distributed by Groveland Food Shelf is non-perishable, however, the food shelf is occasionally able to offer high-in-demand and otherwise hard-to-afford items like dairy products, eggs, and meats. The type of food that the food shelf is rarely able to distribute, yet is greatly desired by clients, however, is fresh produce.

HFTH addresses the trouble that Groveland Food Shelf and other HFTH food shelf partners have in accessing fresh produce to distribute to their clients who otherwise go without. Donations to HFTH bring fresh, nutritious produce, important to health and abundant in our richly agricultural state, to food shelf clients who are thankful for the opportunity to eat healthy foods even in their time of need. With 20% of Groveland Food Shelf’s client base made up of families with young children, at risk of negative growth and development outcomes resulting from poor nutrition, as well as a growing percentage of immigrant clients who are more familiar with preparing and eating fresh produce than they are with the canned varieties commonly offered, HFTH is a staple to the food shelf’s services. “I’ve always enjoyed EFN’s produce programs.”, says Dave Enghusen, the director of Groveland Food Shelf, who has been with the food shelf for more than 20 years and knows how great the area’s needs are.

I recently visited an open mic at Ginko Coffee house in St. Paul where I met Lauren Martinez Catlin. I thought her spoken word poem, The Math Works, communicated the frustrations the working poor encounter.

Enter Lauren Martinez Catlin
I am a story teller.  I wanted to speak to the misconceptions about the poor in our midst by telling the story of minimum wage.  No amount of jargon and rhetoric can rival the power of a human story simply told.  The story I chose is not complicated or remarkable in any way.  It is one woman, working to support herself and her child.

The numbers I use in the poem were carefully researched to reflect the cost of living in the Twin Cities.  The challenges she faces are utterly common: school supplies, doctor visits, worn out shoes, Christmas presents, escalating rent, hunger, and cold.  These kinds of issues can pile up and crush the spirit, but none of them are unsolvable.  They can all be helped, and we can be part of helping.

This poem started when my good friend invited me to perform a spoken word poem at an event she was organizing to promote A Minnesota Without Poverty, an interfaith coalition to end poverty in Minnesota by 2020.  I’d never heard of the organization before, and I didn’t get any direction on what kind of piece to perform.  When I sat down at my desk and thought about poverty, my first thought was about minimum wage.

What struck me was not that minimum wage is so completely impossible to live on, it’s that minimum wage is almost possible to live on.  It kind of works on paper.  A person could potentially pay rent, transportation, and groceries on minimum wage.  But it doesn’t account for illness, for losing some hours at work, for rent hikes, gas prices, cost of food inflation, new shoes, schools supplies, or shifting bus routes.

Minimum wage leaves a person not only poor, but feeling stupid.  The practice of paying a person a little less than they can survive on deprives hardworking people of their independence.  But perhaps more insidious than that, it slowly dismantles their belief that they are capable of being independent.  It first robs them of their power, and then shames them for being powerless.

Lauren Martinez Catlin

Frances Joshua is definitely doing good deeds. She is a part of a group of volunteers, the United Friends in Christ, who volunteer each month to help coordinate the Saint Paul West African distribution at Gethsemane Lutheran in Maplewood MN.  Frances has taken the lead on volunteering every month to coordinate the distribution since the site was established.

The East African Multi-Cultural Mobile Food Shelf site in St. Paul distributes West African-specific food like, fufu flour, gari, maggi cubes, and parboiled rice. Non-perishable food packages (approx 15 lbs.) include culturally-specific foods and milk is also distributed.. Additional food items like bread, juice, tuna and vegetables are commonly distributed but depend on community donations. Distributions are once a month and serve an average of 125 families/households per distribution.

The Multi-Cultural Mobile Food Shelf is designed to help residents who struggle to access food from traditional food shelves. Emergency Foodshelf Network (EFN) delivers a three to four day supply of food to high-rises, multi-cultural communities, and Loaves and Fishes sites around the Twin Cities metro.

Multi-Cultural Mobile Foodshelf increases the amount of culturally appropriate food that is distributed to people in need.  As the Twin Cities has seen growth in our immigrant population, food shelves have not been able to keep up with the rising demand for specific food items (e.g. fufu flour, gari, dried beans, and egg plant).  Culturally specific foods are often expensive and not consistently available through traditional food shelves.  EFN works with agencies and community partners to distribute culturally appropriate foods to East and West African communities as well as Latino communities in the Twin Cities metro area.  Multi-Cultural Mobile Foodshelf ensures that people in need have resources available to cook things that are familiar to them and nutritious for their family.

Learn more about the Multi-Cultural Mobile Foodshelf.