Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank

On July 17 ~ I went out to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and Met with a number of people to discuss my internship and how PASA may be able to collaborate with them. Joyce the CEO of the organization gave me a tour of the very productive facility along with a little history and the Food Banks involvement with food sovereignty both locally and nationally. Joyce also filled me in on workers benefits at the Food Bank, where they pick up and distribute their food and how the Food Bank has been involved with the union and teamsters.

After a couple of hours working in "re-pack" (the area where food that is donated re-packed into efficiently organized boxes for distribution) I had a telephone meeting with Cindy Moore about Community Garden plans being made for Addison Terrace Housing Authority community in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. There is a Food Bank managed farm stand there run completely by volunteers from the community that hope to build there own garden so that they may sell/have there own source of fresh vegetables. This project is very valuable and I hope to meet with other non-profit community gardening organizations in the area that might be able to support it (Landslide Community Farm and Grow Pittsburgh are two)

Afterwards I met with Kathryn Robinson the Glean Coordinator who discussed with me the importance of farm fresh gleaning projects for the food bank and ideas she has for Bike to Glean event as part of PASA's Local Food Month. I will also be organizing a Urban farm/garden awareness event for Local Food Month and hope to collaborate with Kathryn more. I also helped her connect with Mia and Leah who connect with a lot of local farmers at PASA so she can hopefully build her gleaning site list.

I then met with Vicki Lish who is the Food Bank's farm stand coordinator. She explained to me a little about the farm stand project which is a project designed to help bring fresh produce into distressed and/or marginalized communities. The stands are run by local community organizations or neighborhood volunteers. I hope to help Vicki with community outreach by visiting the farm stands an assessing ways they might be able to get more people from the community shopping at the stands. I also hope to connect the farm stands with PASA's long term Market Management project which will hopefully help make EBT machines and WIC easily accessible at more Farmer's Markets and Farm Stands. They are already accepted at all of the Food Bank farm stands but hopefully buy collaboration we can improve the situation in Pittsburgh as a whole. Giving EBT and WIC holders less to think about when they seek access to fresh and affordable produce.