HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Thousands of families suffer from food insecurity in the area. Thursday afternoon, Food Bank of North Alabama cut the ribbon on a new distribution center. Former Executive Director Richard Hiatt said, "I've been in a lot of food banks, and I would say this is one of the best I've ever seen."
This new distribution center is part of the new "Food is the Focus. People are the why" campaign. It's goal will be to fund expenses and expansion. Chief Operating Officer Joshua Matthews said, "We're letting everybody in North Alabama know that there's a role for them if they want to participate."
The warehouse can store four times the amount of food pallets than what its older facilities were able to hold. Matthews said, "For the last 30 years, we've been in a facility that was definitely too small. We had really outgrown it. We weren't able to distribute enough food to feed everybody that had a need in North Alabama."
Officials say there's more of a need today than there was 40 years ago. "When I was here, we were serving about 45,000 families and they said today they're up to 80,000," said Hiatt. "There's now about 184,000 people in North Alabama that are food insecure, so having this new facility is really going to help us be able to distribute a lot more food," said Matthews."
While this new space will help many more families in the community, the move is described as bittersweet. Development Director Bobby Bozeman said, "We know the need's there and the need's growing. So, while we're concerned about that, we are very thankful and gracious to the community for empowering us to be able to serve those people."
"We would like to put ourselves out of business, but we're going to be here as long as the need is," said Matthews.