Edit 11/20/2012: You can access the Agency Survey here.

Questions on either of these issues may be directed to Elianna Bootzin at either eliannab@feedingamericawestmichigan.org or 616-389-6349.

Agency Survey Coming to You in October from Westat

As you may have seen in your August statement enclosure, Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank is participating in Hunger in America 2014, a national study of charitable food assistance in America conducted by the network of 200 Feeding America food banks. The national network has partnered with Westat, a research firm, to design and execute the study.

Westat will contact your agency by email in a couple of weeks to direct you to an online survey to gain a better understanding of the types of programs, services and resources provided by the agencies in West Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Please take your time in completing this survey – you can take more than one sitting. Your agency’s specific answers will be confidential – we will only see the combined results.

Your agency may also be selected for on-site interviews with clients at your program site(s). If your agency is selected, Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank will contact you with more information in early 2013.

NEW: Food Bank Publication of Agency Information Policy

Unless otherwise requested by a specific organization, Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank reserves the right to publicly share the following information for all of its partner agencies by means including but not limited to press releases, newsletters, www.feedingamericawestmichigan.org, Facebook, and Twitter: organization name, program name, city, county, and number of pounds of food bank product acquired in any given time period. Any additional information intended for public consumption will be acquired through communications with an agency representative, who will have the opportunity to restrict what gets published.

If you do NOT wish to have the basic information listed above shared publicly, please submit an opt out form (you may use the electronic version below or return the bottom of the hard copy mailed with your September statement).

Please note: because we have never put this intention into writing before, we will be waiting a short time before putting it into effect. If your organization does not wish to be included, your opt out is due by October 15, 2012, at which point we may begin putting a generic listing of our agencies (names and counties only) on our website for transparency purposes. Opt outs received afterwards may take a few days to remove.

Electronic Opt-Out Form – By filling in the following fields, your organization indicates that it does NOT want its basic information (name, city, county, pounds) distributed in any public venue by Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

If your agency is based in Kent, Muskegon, or Ottawa County, and you distribute a client newsletter, consider including a piece like the following:

Attention, Bridge Card holders: Double Up Food Bucks will be back at your area’s farmers’ markets starting in June. When you use your Bridge Card at a participating farmers’ market, the Double Up Food Bucks program will match you dollar for dollar with bonus funds – up to $20 – that you can use in the market to buy more fresh, Michigan-grown fruits and vegetables. It’s that simple – spend up to $20 on your Bridge Card at the market, and you’ll get up to $20 more, free, to spend on healthy, local foods. Most farmers’ markets and some on-farm produce stands in Kent, Ottawa, and Muskegon Counties are participating. Visit www.doubleupfoodbucks.org or call toll-free 1-866-586-2796 for market locations and more information, or just visit your favorite market starting in June!

Double Up Food Bucks is a project of Fair Food Network, with local support from the Grand Rapids Community Foundation. www.fairfoodnetwork.org

For more information or a more detailed article, contact Rachel Chadderdon Bair, Program Manager, at 734 213 3999 x 203 or rbair@fairfoodnetwork.org.

We’re currently out of Double Up Food Bucks posters, but do have alternative posters at our Comstock Park warehouse about which farmers’ markets and farmers accept Bridge Cards.

Once again, we have lots of USDA chicken available.  The number of cases in online ordering is deceptively small  – there will be more coming to replace our current stock of drums and thighs.  These cases of chicken have the regular USDA handling fee of 12 cents per pound, so each 43 pound case comes to $5.16. With 8 pre-portioned packages to the case, you can provide a family with 5 pounds of chicken for only $0.65!

Need a suggestion for serving it up? Try food bank enthusiast Diana Rattray’s Garlic Chicken recipe. Doesn’t it look delicious?

If you have an order scheduled with our main warehouse in Comstock Park but cannot get it as planned, please call our main phone line, 616-784-3250, to cancel or re-schedule as soon as possible.  Don’t ask for Agency Relations (or send an email that might not get seen for hours), simply give your message to the person who picks up the phone.  We’ll take it from there.

We are implementing this new procedure because messages left by agencies were not getting directed to the appropriate people in a timely manner, therefore undeserved return-to-stock fees were charged.  We believe that following this standardized communication flow will prevent such errors from happening in the future.

We’d really love to see West Michigan information and referral services for food pantries get kicked up a notch, and one of your fellow agencies – Nonprofit Innovations, Inc. – has given us a great way to do that.  If your agency runs a public facing food program that gives people food or other grocery products to take home (and yes, that includes mobile pantry hosts), we’d like you to consider allowing us to post enough information about you for clients to show up at the right place, at the right time, with all things you’d like them to bring along.  (Mobile pantry hosts – if you’re concerned about getting too many families that way, you can simply give out enough information for them to submit a pre-registration at which point you can tell them exactly where and when to be.)    If you decide your answer is yes, please fill out the survey below.  We will upload the aggregated results to www.findafoodpantry.org.  Whatever information you choose to supply will be publicly available and easily found via online search engines like Google. After the upload is done, you’ll be able to update your information on the site.