Improve Disaster Readiness to Solve Hunger

Thank you for being a part of this project!

Feeding San Diego’s mission is to connect every person facing hunger with nutritious meals while maximizing food rescue. Our vision is a hunger-free and healthy San Diego. In FY19, Feeding San Diego provided the equivalent of 26.3 million meals to the community, over half of which was fresh produce.

Thanks to a generous investment from GlobalGiving and our supporters, Feeding San Diego made great strides in obtaining capital items to enhance our day-to-day operations and disaster preparedness capacity. Feeding San Diego recently invested in the following equipment to improve our day-to-day operations and support our emergency-relief preparedness efforts.

PURCHASED EQUIPMENT:

• Pallet jack: The new pallet jack has the capacity to move 4,500 lbs. of food at a time. Purchasing a new pallet jack with GlobalGiving funds allowed us to donate an old pallet jack to an agency partner, improving their operations and capacity to move food into their local community. The new pallet jack has more safety features and a load rest to stabilize contents, improving warehouse safety and efficiency.
• Laptops: New laptops eliminated slower, older computers, which helps improve our immediate office productivity. These laptops also enhance our staff’s ability to work offsite during the event of an emergency, allowing them to visit affected sites and work in real-time during a disaster.
• Back-up battery: We purchased a back-up battery, which will keep the computers and IT serves powered on the west side of our building for up to four hours in the event of a power outage. Before this purchase, we were at risk of losing the use of that office block during an outage.
• Tractor-trailer: A new 42' trailer, which has the potential to move 900,000 pounds of food per month. With a capacity of 30,000 lbs., it can transport more food in one trip more than our current 5,000-10,000 lbs. capacity trucks can do in three round-trips. This positively affects the environment by saving 3,800 miles of travel a month and provides Feeding San Diego with a cost savings of $1,900 worth of fuel per month. By moving more food, more efficiently, we can provide an increased level of service to our clients in both emergency and non-emergency deliveries. We will be able to increase the variety of food transported to our service sites and take multiple deliveries in one load.

These important capital investments help prepare us for any impending disaster recovery scenarios. Over 5,819 fires have been recorded according to Cal Fire and the US Forest Service during the 2019 season, totaling an estimated 162,693 acres of burned land in California as of October 13. Strong Santa Ana winds have begun in San Diego County and the area is on high alert for this season’s fire risk. San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) has already begun precautionary power outages to tens of thousands of San Diego residents.

Feeding San Diego is currently working with SDG&E to create a plan to make supplementary Mobile Pantry food distributions available at SDG&E Community Resource Centers during power outages or other disaster-related events. Your investment helped Feeding San Diego prepare for enhanced operations and delivery of food to emergency distributions in the inevitable event of fires in our area in the future. Thank you for being a part of Feeding San Diego’s efforts to improve our disaster-preparedness plan, ensuring we can continue to provide much needed hunger-relief services under any circumstances!

Links:

• https://feedingsandiego.org