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Meredith Knopp

Everywhere you look, there are signs for going back to school: school supplies, clothes, and, my favorite, the “must-haves” plastered across physical and online stores. As I glance at the signs, posters, and pop-up banners, I cannot help but notice something glaringly absent from all the marketing campaigns: food.

Interestingly, a protractor and a specific brand of watercolor paints are “necessary” for parents to purchase—alongside the sneakers, jeans, and designer accessories to ensure our kiddos “fit in” with everyone. Yet nobody is talking about the 1 in 6 children right here in our region who are food insecure. Kiddos will struggle to reach their full potential because it is hard to concentrate when your stomach is growling and your head is pounding because you haven’t eaten in almost 24 hours. 

For mainstream businesses focused on bottom lines and tax-free weekends, this isn’t something they will talk about. However, at the St. Louis Area Foodbank, we focus on ensuring all our kiddos across the bi-state region have the foods they need to thrive throughout the school year. One of the many ways we do this is through our school markets program. Thanks to amazing corporate sponsors like Emerson, Boeing, and Bayer, we can operate beautiful, fully stocked markets inside schools across the region. These school markets provide students and their families with access to the healthy and nutritious foods they need to live their best possible lives. 

With more on the way, these 35 school markets across the region are bright and vibrant – with refrigerators, freezers, and shelves filled with produce, dairy, protein, and shelf-stable food items. They allow students and families to choose what foods they want; other resources are available to assist them if needed. They de-stigmatize the need to ask for help and, according to school leaders, are “game changers” when it comes to attendance and performance in the classroom. 

This year, in addition to our school markets, the St. Louis Area Foodbank is also rolling out a new program, school pantries. This is an excellent option for schools with less space to devote to a market. School pantries are quicker and more accessible for the St. Louis Area Foodbank to set up, and they provide a wide variety of shelf-stable products for students and families to select from every week. School pantries already exist at four (4) higher education locations across the region, with more on the way on both sides of the river. Our goal is simple: ensure students at all levels of education have enough healthy and nutritious meals to perform at the top of their class this year.  

Meredith Knopp

It might seem strange to see “New Year” in July – but for the St. Louis Area Foodbank, we begin our new Fiscal Year July 1. This means it is a great opportunity for us to take all that we have learned and look on how we might evolve to better serve and support our 26 counties in both Missouri and Illinois. Our focus on sourcing healthy and nutritious foods and distributing them in a more equitable manner to meet our partners’ and neighbors’ needs is what we are excited to highlight.

This year, you will see innovation, evolution, and expansion from the St. Louis Area Foodbank. One of our biggest evolutions is around what was formerly known as our “mobile markets” or “mobile distributions” program. This donation-based program has been around for over a decade, experienced exponential growth to support our community during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was also in need of an update. Our team worked hard to gather feedback from partners and looked at the trends of food donations. With this information, we put together a plan to figure out how to best support all our 26 counties and the hundreds of thousands of people struggling with food insecurity in a more equitable and comprehensive way. These were the conversations this spring that led to our newest evolution – ending mobile markets as they are known and thinking bigger than just a market – and launching “FARMs”.

FARMs stands for Food Access and Resource Markets. Simply put, FARMs are rapid food distributions held in strategically placed locations in every county the St Louis Area Foodbank serves. They provide a reliable source of food to neighbors in areas that lack pantry access points. FARMswill connect communities to needed food assistance and additional resources. This will help increase food security and alleviate financial hardships by allowing money that would have been spent on food to be spent on other necessities. These are drive-thru distributions where neighbors stay in their vehicles and volunteers place items inside as neighbors drive through the distribution.

FARMs are hosted in areas that have high rates of food insecurity but have limited food access points. Each partner site in all 26 counties will host a FARM distribution event monthly, at the same occurrence and time each month, so there is consistency for our neighbors. We will assess sites after one year to ensure that the program is beneficial to the community. If changes in location need to be made, we are staying open to learning and growing, as we should be with the launch of something new. Our goal is to have two FARMs distributions per month in every county that we serve – so 52 large scale FARMs distributions every month!

We are excited about FARMs for many reasons – and here are just a few:

• FARMs increases food access for people living in areas with limited access points and options. Each distribution will have enough food for approximately 500 families.
• FARMs provide both fresh and non-perishable foods to communities as well as additional resources, such as SNAP and Medicaid application assistance.
• FARMs are available to everyone. Neighbors do not need to provide identification or proof of income to receive food.
• FARMs will allow for enhanced local community engagement by encouraging communities to recruit for local volunteer participation, create community-based FARMs marketing and support opportunities, and create and share stories that highlight the incredible collaborations across our service territory on the St. Louis Area Foodbank website and social media postings.
• There is NO COST to our partners for hosting the FARMs distributions and no cost to our neighbors who will receive this wonderful food.

We are truly grateful and humbled by everyone who has provided support and feedback as we evolve our programs, with a laser focus on providing healthy and nutritious foods and other resources to those who need it most. Like anything new, there will be lessons learned, and maybe even some growing pains, but we are confident that our communities will emerge stronger as a result!

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Meredith Knopp

Today Feeding America released publicly the annual “Map the Meal Gap” results. Map the Meal Gap (MMG) is Feeding America’s annual study on local food insecurity and food cost. The 2024 release features data as of 2022, the most recent year available.

The insights from this year’s study confirm what we hear from people facing hunger: elevated food prices and overall inflation are making hunger in America worse. This powerful tool helps us understand the local impact of food insecurity and underlines that we can choose to end hunger in America by coming together as a nation.