Help Us Provide Food For All

Empowering People to Thrive

Community Resource Center at S. Waterloo Road

We know that many of our clients are forced to make difficult choices between paying food or other basic needs such as medication, rent, utilities, and more.

By creating improved access to a variety of resources conveniently located under one roof, we can better address the underlying causes of food insecurity and in turn, provide more opportunities for long-term economic stability.

Our Community Resource Center will be a place where various local nonprofit partners will provide on-site services to help clients access resources they need to address the common issues that cause food insecurity, which are often related to healthcare, housing, and employment. This inclusive approach will centralize impactful services, resources, and nonprofit partners in one convenient location to facilitate greater collaboration for our shared clients.

There has been great interest by nonprofit service providers that want to partner with us on this impactful project and the following organizations are confirmed to be on-site (conversations are still ongoing):

We believe that by facilitating access to both healthy food and a variety of social service resources, we will be creating a unique and critical resource for Northeast Ohio and for our many neighbors in need.

Expanding Our Reach

Additional Capacity Building

What we know from these past two years is that even with these expanded capacities, we will still have neighbors in need.

Our enhanced project scope will give us the opportunity to plan for additional Community Resource Centers on the south and west sides of our service area over the next few years (2024-2026) and increase the capacity of our programmatic partners to expand their services.

With the Food Bank’s enhanced capacity and ability to distribute even more healthy foods like fresh produce, lean proteins, and dairy, we will also need to help ensure that our over 1,000 programmatic partners have the resources they need to distribute more food to more people in need. Many of our partners have the desire to do more but may not have the financial resources to expand their services. About 80% of our emergency feeding programs have food budgets of less than $2,000/year. 

By making an investment in our network to help them do more, we can collectively reach more people who need us. Capacity-building projects will increase the ability of our partners to provide nutritious foods to clients by eliminating barriers with an intentional focus to increase the number of people who can access services. Barriers can include, but are not limited to, equipment, hours of operation, volunteer/staff capacity, transportation, marketing efforts, and operational support.

We believe that by making investments in our network of partners to help them break down barriers to serving more people, we will expedite getting more food and additional resources to those in our community that need them most.