Mission Statement

Our mission is to provide comprehensive and compassionate HungerCare whenever and wherever it is needed to safeguard the health, well-being and productivity of food-insecure Kansas families and their children, as well as senior citizens, the homeless and the chronically ill and impoverished among us.

History

The Kansas Food Bank has the mission of providing hunger-relief whenever and wherever it is needed throughout our 85-county service area. We are committed to safeguarding the health, well-being and productivity of food-insecure Kansas families and their children, as well as senior citizens, the homeless and the chronically ill, and all live in poverty.

We began operations in a rented building in 1984, serving just 16 agencies in a single county. Twenty-five years later we are serving 530 hunger-relief partners in 49 counties, with nearly 8 million lbs. of food distributed in the past year. We attribute our on-going growth to several deliberate moves intended to increase the number of hungry people we help, the ways in which we help, and the amount of food we distribute. Here are the highlights of our organizational activities and how they have grown over time:

• In 1985, the Kansas Food Bank became affiliated with Feeding America (known then as America’s Second Harvest), a national nonprofit that coordinates collection and distribution of millions of tons of food from national corporations that would otherwise be discarded as unmarketable waste. Our affiliation provides about half of the food we receive and distribute today.
• In 1990, the Kansas Food Bank began supplementing donated food with purchased food, in order to provide more nutritious, high-protein food to our clients such as meats and peanut butter. Through the Food Purchase Program, we locate deeply discounted foods and pass this savings to our agencies.
• In 1994, the Kansas Food Bank began its specific focus on addressing child hunger through its own programs when it opened its first ‘Kids Kitchen’ at the Boys and Girls Club in south Wichita. A second Kids Kitchen opened in August 1996 at a Boys and Girls Club in north Wichita. The Kansas Food Bank provides both the food and a cook. Both sites remain in operation, providing a free nutritious evening meal to approximately 500 children a day.
• The following year, a state task force determined that 1 in 22 Kansas children were at risk of hunger because of lack of food available to people in poverty in rural Kansas. The Kansas Food Bank responded by launching its Rural Food Delivery System, which delivers food to rural communities. That rural deliver system today makes regular deliveries to Dodge, Garden City, Liberal, Colby, Goodland, Hays, Victoria, Great Bend, Concordia, Salina, Emporia, Junction City, Prescott, Ft. Scott and Iola. Rural delivery distribution got a big boost in 1997 when the Kansas Food Bank opened an 18,500 sq. ft. warehouse in Independence, doubling the food distributed to Southeast Kansas.
• In 2004, the Kansas Food Bank took another significant step in serving children by launching the Food4Kids backpack program. Food4Kids is designed to fill in the weekend gap in existing feeding programs designed to serve children at the highest risk of chronic undernourishment. Specifically, Food4Kids provides emergency weekend food — distributed in zip-bags that can be slipped into children’s school backpacks — to kids who exhibit physical and behavioral signs of not otherwise eating on the days they are away from school meal programs. What began with 60 students in a few schools has grown into a program that now serves 5,000 children in 300 schools in 38 counties.

Our most significant growth came in 2006 when the Kansas Food Bank moved into its new warehouse at 1919 E. Douglas. The new facility, more than twice the size of the former building at 46,000 sq. ft., enabled a proportionate increase in food distribution. Prior to 2006, annual food distribution fell in the range of 4.5 to 5.5 million a year; with the increased capacity provided by the new warehouse, annual distribution grew to 5.7 million lbs in 2007, 7.2 million in 2008 and 8.0 million in 2009.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS