The Atlanta Community Food Bank plans to open its first “community food center” in Gwinnett County this June, as unemployment and the demand for food spike during the coronavirus pandemic.
Food bank CEO Kyle Waide said during a webinar on Thursday that the center will act as a localized food pantry. The food bank currently partners with nearly 700 nonprofits by providing them with supplies for food drives and giveaways. The community food center, however, will be operated directly by the food bank and its volunteers.
The center opening in June will be in southern Gwinnett County, just east of Stone Mountain on the Gwinnett-DeKalb line.
“There’s a lot of need in that area,” Waide said during the webinar. “And we’ll be excited to open up that community food center to help support that need.”
The food bank plans to open a second location near the end of 2020, Waide said, though the location for that center has not been announced.
Headquartered in East Point, the food bank covers 29 counties in metro Atlanta and North Georgia. With a yearly budget of more than $140 million, the food bank gets much of its funding from financial donations and government grants. It also gets direct food donations from grocery stores, though that supply has dipped during the pandemic.
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Waide said the new outposts have been part of the strategic plan for the food bank, indicating that they are not a direct response to the coronavirus pandemic. But the center is sure to help streamline the food bank’s distribution efforts as it deals with a spike in demand during the current crisis.
Waide estimates there has been a 30 to 40% rise in the number of people getting food from food drives and other emergency sources, he previously told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The food bank distributed nearly 8 million pounds of food in April, which equates to about 6.5 million meals, Waide said.
The surge in need is believed to be linked to the large number of layoffs and furloughs that followed the virus-related economic shutdown. Since mid-March, nearly 1.4 million unemployment claims have been processed in Georgia – accounting for about 28% of the workers in the state.
Food and dining editor Ligaya Figueras contributed to this report.
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