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A Note from our Executive Director
Dear Lori,
For many years, LEAP has hosted a monthly Healthy Food and Wellness Fair. We receive food from the Food Bank, and invite other organizations to join us to educate our community about health, wellness, and resources as they come to pick up food. Our food distributions have been a great way to educate the community about ACEs and resilience, about healthy strategies for managing stress, and about nutrition. Each month, more than 200 families, representing more than 700 people come to receive food and information. Sadly, after June our monthly fair will come to an end.
Beginning in January, we began to notice that fewer people were coming to collect food. We were pretty sure this was not an indication of a reduction in need, but we didn’t want to assume. So, we conducted a survey of our clients.
60% of our clients surveyed said that fear of ICE stops them from receiving services.
Fortunately, 88% of our clients indicated that they feel safe coming to our FRC for services.
In order to best meet the needs of our clients, we made the difficult decision to end our monthly public food distribution and instead expand our emergency food pantry. Families will be able to come directly to our Family Resource Center offices and pick up food.
This change comes with both a challenge and an opportunity. We need your help.
We will need to stock the shelves ourselves.
The opportunity is for our community to get involved. We are hoping you, your organization or business, your church or temple, or someone you know would be willing to adopt our emergency pantry for a month. Or just donate so that we can purchase gift cards for groceries.
If you’d like to adopt our emergency food pantry you can sign up here, or email Darcy Brakeman at DarcyB@leapcentralcoast.org.
If you’re interested in the full results of our client survey, let me know. We are working on putting together a presentation and I’ll happily share it with you.
LEAP has a strong history of adapting our services to meet the community’s changing needs. During COVID, we also shifted away from public food distributions and began distributing food weekly. We don’t know what the next year will look like for LEAP or for our clients. We don’t know how much this operational change will cost, nor how much demand we will see. What we do know is that LEAP is committed to being flexible and resilient to care for the most vulnerable families in our community. I hope you’ll partner with us.
With gratitude,
Lori Lander Goodman
Executive Director
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