The Greater Chicago Food Depository demonstrated one of those new avenues on Tuesday, delivering fresh produce to the Skokie pantry in a refrigerated truck recently bought by Kraft Foods. The 24-foot truck, with six refrigerated bays and two dry storage bays, features doors that swing open from the sides to make it easier for volunteers to quickly distribute 13,000 pounds of food.A church in our ward was already in the news for providing a food pantry service in these difficult times!
The truck will let the food depository double the number of its mobile pantry sites to 20, with an additional 960,000 pounds of food to be distributed in fiscal year 2009-10, spokesman Bob Dolgan said. With the Chicago pilot program as its model, Kraft has committed to spend $4.5 million on 25 trucks that will work in six other cities in the next three years, including New York, San Antonio and Madison, Wis.
Although the food depository's truck started its tour in Skokie, it will usually head to other sections of Cook County with a high concentration of poverty, including the Chicago neighborhoods of Chatham, Chicago Lawn, Fuller Park, Kenwood and Uptown, Dolgan said.
Since 2008, the Greater Chicago Food Depository and the St. Charles-based Northern Illinois Food Bank each say they have seen a 35 percent surge in need at area food pantries.
Dispatches from Chicago's south side.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Refrigerated truck serves as traveling food pantry
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