Oregon Food Bank
Rachel Bristol Little, executive director
2540 NE Riverside Way
Portland, Ore. 97211
(503) 282-0555

This efficient, effective food bank, the result of a 1988 merger between Oregon Food Share and Portland's Interagency Food Bank, differs from many of the good, large food banks around the country because it is active in advocacy and eager to try new ideas.

As state TEFAP provider to 19 regional food banks, OFB not only provides food but also works directly with the state's other food banks to encourage education and advocacy. Accordingly, while its No. 1 priority is to secure and distribute food, the bank's formal mission also calls on it to inform the legislature and the public about hunger issues. This stands in startling contrast to many statewide food banks whose boards explicitly proscribe advocacy and lobbying.

To that end, OFB took the lead in 1989 in persuading the state legislature to declare a "food emergency" and form a 22-member State Task Force on Hunger. The task force, including an OFB member, was charged with studying the nature of hunger in Oregon and determining what relief was available. The report, just out, points to hunger as a SYMPTOM of poverty and problems in the larger economic structure. It provides strong ammunition to persuade the state to provide general-fund dollars for hunger relief, something that Oregon had never done before, relying entirely on federal money. As a result, the legislature is now considering a "pop tax" of 1 cent per bottle on soft drinks, a measure that could raise $6 million to $15 million for food relief. The task force, with OFB support, is also pushing for full state funding for WIC and for a mandatory school-breakfast program.

OFB's "Child's Path" program, similar to WIC but available to mothers who can't meet WIC's "medically needy" requirement and others who fall through the cracks in the WIC program, reached about 7,000 individuals last year with supplemental food.

In addition to advocacy, OFB also has a number of creative programs on the food-distribution side. It organizes a statewide food drive as an extra source of food and a way to get people involved; it established one of the first food recovery centers, in which volunteers sort through discarded canned goods and other food merchandise and salvage still-usable items for distribution; and it has established a new food-saving model in which bulk perishable food (a one-ton block of frozen cauliflower, in one instance; a truckload of fresh salmon in another) that would otherwise go to waste is repackaged in units of usable size by volunteers.

In another effort to make government commodity foods more usable, Little is experimenting with a way to use volunteer work to convert bulk USDA flour and butter into pre-packaged, easy-to-use baking mix.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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