New equipment a game-changer for Helping Harvest
The two units will allow the food bank to store an additional three million pounds of food
Jay Worrall made no attempt to hide his feelings.
“I am excited,” the executive director of Helping Harvest said, over-enunciating each word as he smiled widely.
The small crowd gathered around him inside the Spring Township food bank Monday morning clearly shared his sentiment. They were there for a pretty big moment, after all, one that has been nearly two years in the making.
Helping Harvest was officially opening its two new cold storage units.
Worrall called the new units a game-changer for Helping Harvest, allowing the food bank to greatly expand its ability to distribute perishable, healthy items to those in need.
“This will be a transformational change to the way we serve families in our community,” he said.
Helping Harvest started pursuing the idea of increasing its cold storage capabilities in September 2020. The project has moved forward slowly, delayed by things such as supply chain interruptions that hampered the construction industry.
“There was a foam shortage,” Worrall said. “The whole thing is foam.”
But with a significant batch of support from the community, Helping Harvest persevered and moved the more than $900,000 project forward.
The support included included a $450,000 gift from the United Way of Berks County’s MacKenzie Scott fund and a matching donation from an anonymous local philanthropist.
“I think we all recognize that Helping Harvest is an organization we can all feel comfortable investing in,” said Tammy White, president of United Way of Berks County.
White praised the food bank for its work during the pandemic, saying its people were able to turn on a dime to address the sudden, desperate need that appeared. She said they continue to do amazing work in ensuring our neighbors have the food that they need.
“It was such an easy decision for our board of directors,” she said of provide funding for the cold storage units.
The project also received a variety of other, smaller contributions toward the project.
“I never expected the generosity we’ve seen from our community over the last two years,” Worrall said. “What keeps me up at night is the thought of someone coming to us for help and we don’t have any food for them. The generosity of the community has helped assure that that doesn’t happen.”
A continued need
The 30,000-square-foot units will increase Helping Harvest’s cold storage capacity by 50%. Each can be used as a refrigerator or as a freezer.
Worrall said they have room to store about 3 million pounds of food.
“It’s going to allow us to distribute a lot more,” he said.
And given the ongoing high level of need, that’s important.
Worrall said inflation and high gas prices have pushed food insecurity in Berks nearly to levels seen during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In June 2020, he said, Helping Harvest spent about $1.6 million on purchasing food to distribute. Last month it spent just over $1.4 million.
Worrall said that at the beginning of the year he projected Helping Harvest would distribute about $10 million of food in 2022, but now it looks like the number will be closer to $14 million.
Looking forward
With the cold storage units up and running, Helping Harvest is looking toward its next steps.
Worrall said the nonprofit has come to understand that there is a limited amount of food available to it, so his team needs to find the most impactful way to distribute it.
One of the most important ways is to make sure children under the age of 8 have enough to eat. If they don’t, Worrall said, it can cause life-long deficits that will never be made up.
To address that concern, Helping Harvest operates a weekender bag program during the school year. Each Friday elementary school students receive a bag of food for the weekend.
In the past, food was distributed to about 1,800 kids. But when the program resumes this fall, Worrall said, about 5,000 kids will be provided with bags.
Helping Harvest is also building new relationships with pre-K and child care providers to expand the number of kids impacted. And the food bank is working to identify and assist pregnant women facing food insecurity.
Seniors also are at elevated risk of food insecurity, Worrall said. Helping Harvest provides about 2,000 seniors with monthly boxes of food through the Pennsylvania Senior Food Box program but wants to expand that to about 2,400. The new cold storage units will allow Helping Harvest to included healthy, nonperishable items with the boxes.
The third priority that Worrall discussed promises to be Helping Harvest’s next big thing.
The food bank often receives food donations of items that are too big to dole out to families. Things like 5-pound cans of tomatoes or massive cuts of meat.
“We can’t hand a 40-pound beef roast to a family,” Worrall said.
While some of those items can be sent to local soup kitchens, Helping Harvest has been searching for ways to make use of them. The answer is using the bulk food items to prepare meals that can be frozen and distributed — like taking bulk chicken packages and those giant cans of tomatoes and making chicken parmesan.
To do that, Helping Harvest is in the early stages of a plan to create its own commercial kitchen, Worrall said.