2018 was a standout year for Nourish Pierce County. Nourish served 61,000 clients in need, meaning that 7% of the population of Pierce County received food from Nourish in 2018. This is an “unduplicated” number, meaning individuals are only counted once regardless of the number of times they received food from our food banks. On average, clients visited a Nourish food bank six times last year.
In addition, Nourish:
- provided more than four million meals to people here in Pierce County
- distributed six million pounds of food
- volunteers contributed more than 83,000 hours of their time last year, equating to roughly 40 full-time staff people.
Last year, Nourish improved the way we work so we can better serve the community.
We purchased and built out a second mobile food bank truck. With our new truck, we started service at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and Cedarcrest Middle School, increasing our mobile food bank sites from 10 to 12 last year. Now, the new mobile food bank is allowing us to partner with community and technical colleges. We have already launched service at many new sites in 2019.
Nourish installed a walk-in freezer and refrigerator at our warehouse, which allows us to store more food and be more strategic about bulk donations and food purchases, reducing our costs and improving what we can offer to people in need.
We also launched a food recovery program with Costco, thanks to our continued partnership with Food Lifeline. Once each day, we send a refrigerated truck, donated by United Way of Pierce County, to the Tacoma Costco store to collect food that Costco can no longer sell, but is still safe to eat. In the first five weeks alone, we received 30,000 lbs of donated food from Costco, including a large amount of fresh produce, one of our areas of greatest need. This program has expanded what we offer to our clients, helped us spend less on food purchases, and reduced food waste.
These are just a few examples of how Nourish improved how we worked in 2018 so that we can better serve people in need in Pierce County.
Everything Nourish did last year was the result of the generosity of this incredible community – your donations, gifts, grants, food drives, volunteer hours, and so much more. We are grateful to everyone who supported Nourish. You helped us help the members of our community in need. Thank you!