Central California Food Bank Helps Local Families

Feeding thousands of people in Fresno would not be possible without community members volunteering. A local Fresno mother volunteered her young daughter to learn the importance of giving back to the community. The food bank relies on volunteers to help feed thousands of local families each week.

Over 300,000 thousand people have been fed just this past month by the Central California Food Bank. These numbers have nearly doubled since before the pandemic. 25% of families seeing help from the food bank are here for the first time.

With the holidays already here, volunteers are working around the clock packing holiday food boxes so that members of our community do not have to worry about whether or not they will have a Thanksgiving dinner.

Although half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables come from right here in the Central Valley, access to these foods is hard to come by. The price of fresh produce has increased, and for many of these farmers, their jobs are seasonal. They are just not making enough money to keep what they grow.

Twenty-five percent of families in Fresno do not have the luxury to get to choose what they are going to eat for dinner, instead, they must decide if they get to eat dinner. Over 54 million pounds of food was distributed this past year and the food bank hopes to maintain those numbers and feed local families during the holidays.