When Our Partners Need Us, GBFB Is There

When the Falmouth Service Center temporarily closed last week due to a possible COVID-19 outbreak, The Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB) sprang into action to ensure struggling families on the Cape didn’t lose access to healthy food.

GBFB normally provides the service center more than 70,000 pounds of healthy food every month for their food pantry and meal programs—serving an average of 3,000 people each month. When that critical food distribution was jeopardized, GBFB staff provided immediate on-the-ground support.

GBFB Team Members began packing emergency food boxes full of shelf-stable items such as beans, sauce, rice, shelf stable milk, pasta, tuna, apple sauce, and more, that could be used for safe, no-contact distributions. On Tuesday, March 31, a GBFB Truck driver brought these boxes down to Falmouth, where five GBFB Team Members distributed the food to families in need using a no-contact drive through model.

Due to quick thinking from our team members and our close partnership with the service center, we safely distributed food to 172 households in just two hours.

Thankfully, the potentially infected service center staff member tested negative for COVID-19, and Falmouth Service Center re-opened on Thursday, April 2. The Service Center has continued offering a no-contact drive-through model of distribution ever since. Many of our other agencies have been adopting this practice as a means to safely distribute food during this crisis.

After helping the Falmouth Service Center get back on their feet, GBFB team members continue to pack these emergency boxes and will be ready to go whenever any one of our partner agencies needs us.

The Falmouth Service Center is one of the more than 500 food pantries, meal programs and emergency shelters that comprises our hunger-relief network, all of whom have been affected in some way by the COVID-19 crisis. Throughout the duration of this crisis, GBFB remains committed to our mission of providing healthy food to anyone in need and ending hunger across Eastern Massachusetts.