Vermont Food Bank meets fundraising goals

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(Host) In December, the Vermont Food Bank sounded an alarm…

More people were turning to its member agencies to keep food on the table as the recession deepened.

But fewer people could afford to donate to the Food Bank’s budget.

VPR’s Ross Sneyd has an update.

(Sneyd) Like many nonprofit social service agencies, the Food Bank raises most of its money during the holidays.

Because of the recession, the food bank’s budget grew 20 percent from a year earlier. Co-chief executive Christine Foster seriously doubted whether they would collect the $800,000 needed from holiday donors.

(Foster) “Working into about the second or third week of December, the numbers were not looking very good. But the last 10 days of December were just so heartening to see how many people responded to our call or decided what they were going to do. We made our goal.”

(Sneyd) The Food Bank is an umbrella organization. It raises money and collects food for distribution to 109 local food shelves all around Vermont.

Without the Food Bank, many of those local shelves might be bare.

(Foster) “For us to be able to meet our fund-raising goal means that those agencies, those food shelves in communities, will be able to get the types of food that they want and the amount of food that they need in order to feed the people in their towns.”

(Sneyd) The struggle isn’t over for the Food Bank or the people it serves. Foster says there are fund-raising goals every month. In January, they will be looking for $130,000.

For VPR News, I’m Ross Sneyd

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