NORTHAMPTON — Florence Bank recently donated $50,000 to the Community Food Distribution Project, a local initiative that is working to meet growing food insecurity.
The project — launched last month by the Northampton Survival Center, Grow Food Northampton, and Community Action Pioneer Valley — makes bags and boxes of food available for pickup at Jackson Street School in Northampton and a number of other locations around the city.
“We are pleased to be able to contribute to these worthy organizations that meet the needs of our most vulnerable community members during this time of crisis,” Kevin Day, the bank’s CEO and president, said in a statement. “The Community Food Distribution Project was easy to get behind.”
Grow Food Northampton and the Northampton Survival Center are splitting the funding, said Heidi Nortonsmith, executive director of the Northampton Survival Center, and Alisa Klein, executive director of Grow Food Northampton. Much of the money will be put toward purchasing food.
“Grow Food Northampton is really interested in creating a sustainable food system that helps support local farmers during this time that their usual markets have, by in large, dried up and at the same time support people who are experiencing increasing food insecurity during the pandemic,” Klein said.
In the first four weeks, the project fed nearly 2,000 people, many of whom were new clients, Nortonsmith said. “I think we typically would see somewhere like 36 new households a month,” she said. “We saw, I think, 237 new households in that same period of time.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.