The Maryland Food Bank gathers excess donated grocery products from the food industry and the general public and distributes these products to community food providers.

Description:
The Maryland Food Bank provide 12 million pounds of food annually to 1,000 nonprofit community food providers - including food pantries, soup kitchens, emergency shelters, low-income day care centers, after-school programs, senior centers, rehabilitation centers, and other feeding programs.

The Maryland Food Bank supplies the food for over 50,000 Marylanders each week who otherwise would go hungry or not eat enough, including families with children, the elderly, the homeless, the homebound, low-income workers, the recently unemployed, and people with AIDS and other health problems.

In addition to providing food, we offer agencies ongoing support, services and education to the community food providers in our network. We regularly conduct nutrition and food safety education workshops and networking sessions and provide them with a variety of tools and publications to enable them to strengthen their programs.

The Maryland Food Bank operates from two facilities: one in Baltimore, serving Central Maryland, and one in Salisbury, serving the Eastern Shore. Our Baltimore operation supplies six Subsidiary Distribution Organizations with food– Community Action Food Bank (Harford County), Garrett County Food Resources, Food Resources, Inc. (Washington and Frederick counties), Howard County Food Bank, Southern Maryland Food Bank, and Western Maryland Food Bank – expanding our reach to counties beyond our warehouses.

History:
The Maryland Food Bank was founded in 1979 to address the growing needs of people seeking emergency food assistance in Maryland. Since then, we have grown our food distribution, operations, and programs to better serve our network of community food providers - and ultimately the more than 235,000 people in Maryland who rely on the food we provide each year.

Our Food Distribution Has Grown

· The Maryland Food Bank started out providing food to 38 community food providers, mostly in Baltimore City. Today, we serve 1,000 food providers statewide, including soup kitchens, food pantries, emergency shelters, after-school programs, senior centers, and other feeding programs.

· In our first year, we distributed 400,000 pounds of food. We now distribute over 12 million pounds of food a year.

Contact person: Vanessa Reed, Volunteer Coordinator, (phone), (email)
Office fax number: (410) 536-0438

Address:

2200 Halethorpe Farms Road Baltimore, MD 21227 (See a map)

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