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Helping the hungry
(by Kara Krekeler - November 25, 2009)
As the holidays approach, food is on everyone’s mind. But that’s the case year-round for Operation Food Search, a University City-based organization dedicated to feeding the hungry in the metro area.
“We get local food to feed local people,” said Sunny Schaefer, executive director of Operation Food Search.
Operation Food Search was founded in 1981 after some socially conscious St. Louisans noticed the amount of food going to waste on produce row while people went hungry. Over the years, the organization grew to serve as the liaison between grocery stores, restaurants and food packaging companies and the churches, shelters and food pantries that seek donations from them.
“Schnucks can’t deal with 300 agencies, so they deal with one, with us,” said Karen Klaus, director of development for Operation Food Search.
In 2008, Operation Food Search gathered about 20 million pounds of food to help 300 such agencies to feed 120,000 people a month. A single month today brings in quadruple the amount of food gathered in the first year of Operation Food Search, Schaefer said.
Most of that food spent at least a little time in the organization’s 25,000-square-foot warehouse on Olive Boulevard. Food distributors and grocery stores send trucks full of food to the warehouse, where volunteers break the large quantities into volumes that are more manageable for the food pantries and soup kitchens. Then representatives from those agencies stop by twice a week to fill up pickup trucks or vans with the goods.
The facility has enough space to hold 10 semi trailers full of frozen food, five trailers of refrigerated goods and “at least 50 trailers” of shelf-stable food, Schaefer estimated. While Schaefer said she hasn’t tested the limits, all that space has come in handy on occasion, such as a recent day when seven trailers of yogurt showed up. Operation Food Search staffers and volunteers contacted everyone they could think of to take the yogurt, and fortunately none of it went to waste. Another day, a trailer full of apples, packaged in 800-pound containers, showed up at the warehouse.
“We never know what we’re going to get,” Schaefer said.
In addition to its more traditional role of providing food for agencies, Operation Food Search has also expanded the scope of its programs with Operation Backpack and the Metal to Food and Furniture to Food programs.
With Operation Backpack, the organization is reaching into public schools to help students who are enrolled in subsidized food programs. While the kids receive breakfasts and lunches at school during the week, oftentimes they go hungry over the weekend, Klaus said.
Launched two years ago, Operation Backpack is a program that provides, each Friday, a bag filled with enough nutritious food and kid-friendly recipes to get an enrolled child through the weekend. On Mondays, the children return the bags to get filled the next week.
“For many of these children, if not for the backpack program, they would go home on Friday and not have anything to eat all weekend,” said Kate Kupstas, an Operation Food Search volunteer who leads a team of backpack stuffers for the program.
The program now serves 1,600 children each week in the city of St. Louis, University City, Wellston and Riverview Gardens. Express Scripts recently donated $54,000 to Operation Food Search to “adopt” Cool Valley Elementary School near its headquarters. Klaus said that the organization hopes to reach 2,000 children by the end of the school year.
While Operation Backpack goes directly to the beneficiaries, the Metal to Food and Furniture to Food programs head in the other direction, bringing Operation Food Search a new source of funding to help pay for Operation Backpack. Food is purchased for Operation Backpack to ensure that every child receives the same goods.
Operation Food Search board member Skip Spielberg came up with the idea for Furniture to Food three years ago when he was helping one of the organization’s member agencies find some furniture. A query to a friend in the furniture business led Spielberg to 40 18-foot church pews that someone was trying to get rid of.
While the pews were no use to the member agency or Operation Food Search as they were, Spielberg realized there was a potential revenue stream in selling donated furniture to used-furniture stores. Not long after the church pews, Bryan Cave law firm donated 25 trailers of furniture and beat-up file cabinets when it moved offices. The furniture netted $7,500 for Operation Food Search, while the file cabinets were sold as scrap and brought in $6,500.
“You keep [the furniture] out of landfills, feed the hungry and the used-furniture company sells it for a cheaper price… it’s a win-win-win situation,” Spielberg said. “It’s a solution for people who don’t know what to do with the old, and with Bryan Cave, their old is pretty nice.”
The cherry on top for Spielberg is that the corporate relationships formed by the furniture and metal programs have resulted in additional donations for Operation Food Search, including full-time pro bono legal help from Bryan Cave.
“Everything has just snowballed,” Schaefer said.
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