Grant expands Palm Springs area impact of FIND Food Bank

Ending hunger today, tomorrow and for a lifetime is a bold endeavor. But that's not deterring FIND Food Bank.

Founded by Wayne Johnson in 1983 in Cathedral City, FIND, which stands for Food in Need of Distribution, now serves about 5,000 square miles of eastern Riverside and southern San Bernardino counties. Its primary goal remains as strong as ever: "To relieve hunger, the causes of hunger and the problems associated with hunger through awareness, education and mobilization of resources and community involvement."

"Our commitment is to always make sure there's enough food for everybody to eat in our valley, so that they don't have to wonder where their next meal is," says FIND Food Bank President and CEO Debbie Espinosa. "We want to give them that strong foundation to utilize and really tackle the root causes of hunger and to be able to bring them out of the line."

FIND's food comprises donations, purchased goods or federal government programs. The organization secures food donations at different points in the supply chain — statewide and local growers to wholesalers, manufacturers and retail grocers. The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), for instance, is a federal program of the USDA, which helps food banks distribute diverse, pre-packed foods sourced from different people and places.

Espinosa says it's all part of the organization's unique approach to ending hunger. Period.

To be sure, the nonprofit's tireless efforts have not gone unnoticed. It now boasts an extensive list of programs and outreach to better serve the community.

The Senior Feeding Program, for instance, is a commodity supplemental food program, that assists 60+ seniors with nutritious USDA commodity dietary supplemental foods. FIND Food Bank is one of 10 food banks in the program providing these commodities to improve the health of seniors.

Other programs stand out.

Because children make up 40% of those at risk of hunger in FIND's service area, the organization partners with schools and community organizations to provide healthy food. In fact, more than 84% of Coachella Valley public school students qualify for free or reduced-price school meals.

On that note, the FIND's Kid's Summer Market is a 10-week long program geared to filling meal gaps for students on summer vacation.

"In the summertime, we experience a strong increase in childhood food insecurity because they are not in schools where they're receiving their school lunches, and it impacts the entire family," Espinosa says. "We partner with many of the school districts in order to ensure that it's one-stop shopping. The school districts are doing the food distributions where they're doing the meals, like the school lunches through the summer programs, but in addition to that, we're doing the food distribution for the entire family to make sure they're taking care of not just at lunch but at breakfast and at dinners, too, throughout the summer."

Elsewhere, FIND's outreach team works one-on-one with clients, helping them apply for food benefits, rental and utility assistance, unemployment, SSI and other financial resources. The goal is to offer people proper tools for self-sufficiency.

Recently, FIND Food Bank received a grant from The Todd Barajas Legacy Fund from the Inland Empire Community Foundation. The fund was established in 2016 for broad and general charitable uses and purposes. Espinosa says the grant buoyed the nonprofit's general operating dollars, which support all its programming.

"Our programmatic framework centers on ending hunger for today, tomorrow and for a lifetime," Espinosa says, noting that the grant helped the nonprofit's emergency food distribution sites for people that need food immediately, either because they're running out of food or they're experiencing food insecurity.

"It's our mobile pantry programs," she says. "It's our 150 distribution sites through supplying and supporting other nonprofit organizations that have food pantries themselves, so they can focus on the people and the client services as opposed to sourcing for food to be able to put into their pantries."

FIND Food Bank takes care of that for those entities, stocking their pantries. Additionally, the organization has about 44 community mobile markets, featuring food bank trucks that venture out to dense, high-food-insecurity areas."

"We will bring the food directly into that community because they may or may not have a nonprofit organization that has a food pantry there," Espinosa says. "We want to make sure they have equitable access to healthy and nutritious foods throughout the Coachella Valley and the desert region."

Not surprisingly, the nonprofit has reached new highs over the last year.

"One of our biggest milestones was something we started in 2019 before COVID," Espinosa says. "We were very excited about launching the Ending Hunger for a Lifetime programmatic framework to really complete that 360-degree wraparound services. Then COVID happened and we had to take a little bit of a hiatus on launching those programs.

"But in the last year, we've really started to see the outcomes of that work in the initial first two years of investments," she says. "We're getting amazing stories from people that are tapping into not just ending hunger for lifetime but utilizing all three of those elements to create a really food-secure platform."

Learn more about FIND Food Bank at findfoodbank.org.

Inland Empire Community Foundation works to strengthen Inland Southern California through philanthropy. Visit iegives.org.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Grant expands Palm Springs area impact of FIND Food Bank