What Americans NEED to Know About Food Insecurity (Food Bank CEO Reveals All) | Let’s Talk Kids

Well, that's great.

And I know ACNJ, our board and staff, two years ago, we did our volunteer day at the food bank.

Yes.

And to me, it was an amazing experience.

The place is huge and it does so much more than food.

So let's talk a little bit about what happens at the community food bank.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, the volunteer experience is amazing.

And we have all together, we would have to hire about 40 more people if we didn't have volunteers.

We have about 80 to 90,000 volunteer hours a year.

So it's incredible.

Every day there's corporations, families, sports teams.

The New Jersey Devils were there the other day.

It's really exciting.

But a lot of what we do, as you say, is food.

And that means a lot of different things.

So it means providing food to food pantries and soup kitchens, senior feeding programs.

But it also means some direct meals.

So we do meals for children in after-school programs, and they're actually made right there in our kitchen.

We do medically tailored meals for some populations.

So for people with diabetes or high blood pressure, that all comes right out of our kitchen.

And then we also do workforce development.

So we work with some populations, mostly people who've either had some time in prison or have some other reason that they're sort of struggling to find work right now.

And we do a culinary training program and then also a warehouse logistics training program.

We also do nutrition education and we do a lot of outreach around SNAP.