White Center Food Bank

Mission

The mission of the White Center Food Bank is to minimize hunger, while nourishing community, nurturing self-reliance and embracing our rich cultural diversity.

Description

White Center Food Bank is a woman-of-color-led organization with over 50% of our staff identifying as BIPOC. We have worked to create an environment that when you walk into the food bank, there is a good chance that someone looks like you. Our biggest program onsite is distributing food to the community at no fee and no service boundary restrictions. We also offer home delivery and mobile "pop up" food banks at 3 senior housing sites and a local community health center.  

With rents rising and grocery spending averaging about $6,000 annually, there’s little left for other basic needs. Our work is critical to ensure nobody is going hungry, or forced to choose between paying for food and paying for other vital expenses like health or childcare.

Ever since the Great Recession, food banks across the nation have seen a shift from providing emergency food to now ensuring serving as a source of long-term supplemental food for individuals and families. And due to COVID-19 and a widening wealth gap there is a heightened need for our services. We have seen a 59% increase over our pre-pandemic numbers and anticipate that this increased demand for services will continue throughout 2024 and beyond.  

In 2023, our statistics show the prevalent issue of hunger in our community and how we are addressing it:

Households served: 37,522 
Individuals served: 107,178
Pounds of food distributed: 1.4 million+ 

It is important to note that 78% of our customers identify with a community of color, and we ensure our programming reflects that. We are one of few food banks that offers in-person translation services in eight languages other than English (Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Khmer/Cambodian, Shanghainese, and Chaozhou). We focus on culturally relevant foods, especially produce (the most popular item across cultures) and we are also one of few food banks that provides Halal meat for our Muslim customers.

Many cultures do not recognize or use traditional food bank offerings such as canned food and dehydrated items. With our multi-lingual staff, we ask our customers what they want to eat and work to find suitable sources for these items. These items include corn husks for tamales, fish sauce, dates, basmati rice, and rice noodles.

To help with hard to access items, once a month we offer $5 produce gift certificates to each family that are redeemable at three local, family-owned grocery stores in White Center. These grocers carry many culturally relevant foods for our Asian and Hispanic/Latinx customers. This is a great partnership with our local grocers and upon redemption, each store additionally offers a one-pound gift of produce to our customers.

Seniors are another growing demographic, comprising about one-third of our total customer base. We provide weekly “Senior Only” food distribution at the food bank and serve three low-income senior housing sites twice a month with a “pop-up” food bank.  We also have a long-standing delivery program of pre-made bags of food for seniors who are homebound. The option of having their food delivered, rather than risking Covid exposure at highly trafficked grocery stores, also gave our seniors peace of mind during the pandemic.

At the beginning of 2024, we moved to a new home in downtown White Center as the King County property we occupy now is slated for redevelopment. We are still fundraising for our Capital Campaign, please visit the link to learn more on how you can support. 

https://www.whitecenterfoodbank.org/capital-campaign

All donations are tax deductible. Our federal tax id is 91-1167830.