Community Update

 

Good morning friends of Care and Share!

Tuesday, we held an important event at our warehouse to update the community about the first year of Within Reach, our five-year plan to ensure that all 171,000 of our Southern Colorado neighbors in need have access to food. In case you weren’t able to make it, here are some of the things that we shared:

 
  • We got food to 14,000 more people than we did the year before, which is about a million more meals. Instead of serving 63% of the need, we are now serving 71%!  
  • We are expanding our Pueblo warehouse to better serve the community and surrounding areas
  • We’ve seen tremendous growth in our Cooking Matters nutrition education program, teaching people how to eat nutritiously on a budget
  • We’ve expanded our USDA foods programs, providing food to seniors and people in poverty throughout every single Southern Colorado county
  • We’re implementing school centered food pantries and school based mobile food pantries to ensure children and their families have food when school meals are not available
  • We revamped our Children’s Nutrition Initiative to reach even more children throughout the year
  • We’ve implemented time saving software that allows our agencies to order their food online and for us to track retail donations more efficiently
We also heard from Troy Stubbings, Kaiser Permanente Southern Colorado Director of Business Operations and Market Expansion. Kaiser Permanente made a significant, three-year investment in Within Reach that will allow us to strategically increase the number of food access points throughout our service area.
Rick Hughes, Director of Food and Nutrition Services for School District 11, also joined us. Our partnership with D11 has been so important as we work to reach children and their families at risk of hunger. Rick stressed the importance of nutritious food for children that are striving to learn, grow, and achieve.
 
 

After the event, we invited participants to head to Mitchell High School to see a school-centered Mobile Food Pantry distribution. It was a great afternoon!

To see news coverage of this event, please click below:

The Gazette

KKTV 11 News

Fox 21 News

 Thanks for reading!

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