Type “Yolo Food Bank” into your favorite GPS app and you’ll arrive at a sprawling, bright, boxy warehouse-type building filled with construction crews wearing hard hats and fluorescent vests who are busy installing flooring, electrical wiring and furniture for the not-for-profit organization that serves all of Yolo County.
These workers have no time to stop and talk with you. They’re on a deadline to have the building ready by the end of the month when Yolo Food Bank’s employees — currently housed down the road, split between an administrative building and a warehouse — need to be out of their old buildings and fully moved in to their new one.
It is a move that everyone connected to the organization is excited to finalize. For too long, employees of the Yolo Food Bank helps have been divided between two small neighboring buildings along Fortna Avenue in Woodland, which sometimes makes working together a challenge.
Employees will tell you they’ve done their best over the last several years to meet the challenge of providing nutritious food and other supplies to needy families throughout Yolo County while ultimately doing more with less. Their current, 16,000-square foot warehouse has just a single freezer and only so much space to offer for the copious amounts of food farmers, grocery stores and other businesses are willing to donate. The shortage of space means they sometimes have to turn food away.
When you serve a community as large as Yolo County, the challenges of not being able to come together as one team combined with the reality that some perfectly good food might have to be turned away is more than disheartening. Fortunately, all of that will be a thing of the past.
By the end of the month, the entire staff at Yolo Food Bank will transition from a 16,000-square foot warehouse and into a larger 42,000-square foot office and warehouse complex on Harter Avenue. The new warehouse — formerly operated by Pacific Fire Safety, a manufacturer of fire extinguishers and other safety equipment — will remedy many of the problems Yolo Food Bank currently has: Gone will be the days of having to walk from one building to another just to meet a team member. Now it will be as simple as walking a few feet to another cubicle. Gone, too, will be the challenges of having to turn away perfectly good food for lack of space — the large warehouse combined with three full-sized refrigerated rooms will almost make sure of it.
Everyone is busy making this transition happen by the end of the month because it has to: Notice was given that the two buildings currently housing Yolo Food Bank have been sold and will soon be converted into a tow truck operation — which makes sense, because that’s what the building used to be. The large need for nutritious food in Yolo County means closing up shop for just one day because of a missed moving deadline is largely off the table.
“Currently, Yolo Food Bank moves four million pounds of food annually,” Joy Cohan, the Director of Philanthropic Engagement, told the Express. “The full need for food security in Yolo County is estimated to be 150 to 200 percent more than what we are doing now.”
The new facility will allow Yolo Food Bank to increase that output, but at a steady pace. Cohan said they anticipate increasing distribution by “at least 50 percent, resulting in six million pounds of food moved” within the first year of the new center being fully operational.
“We will continue to build capacity incrementally over the next several years” until the goal of moving 150 to 200 percent more food is met, Cohan said. “That will still leave room for capacity growth, meaning that the facility should continue to meet the county’s needs for the next several decades.”
The large amount of people living in Yolo County in poverty or otherwise in need of food assistance is high: More than 19 percent of people — or one in five individuals — living in Yolo County fall below the federal poverty line, according to information released by the U.S. Census Bureau. In Winters, that number is less than 10 percent of residents, according to data collected by Yolo County officials and furnished by Yolo Food Bank to the Express.
But Cohan said officials in Winters claim the number is much higher if you broaden the data to include portions of the county served by the Winters Joint Unified School District. A school official told her the number of people living in poverty jumps to more than 25 percent — or one in four people — when you take into account those residents who live both inside and on the periphery of the city line.
Allow that to sink in for a moment. One in four people. Consider your neighbors, your friends, the students who attend school with your children. Statistically, for every group of four people you know, one of them likely faces the challenge of “food insecurity” — an academic term that largely means hunger.
If you think you’re one of the lucky individuals who surrounds themselves with other people who aren’t hungry, you’re probably wrong. People who are classified as “food insecure” are statistically unlikely to make it known because of a stigma associated with poverty. Studies largely confirm their concerns: One in two Americans surveyed said they believed poverty was caused by a lack of aspiration and motivation, according to data released by the Kaiser Family Foundation and others. (The Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not a part of Kaiser Permanente, operates Kaiser Health News. The Express is a Kaiser Health News media partner.)
That perspective is largely untrue: Many of the people Yolo Food Bank have jobs, pay taxes and contribute to society. But their paychecks may fall short of fully funding their ability to secure nutritious food. For some in rural portions of the county, access to grocery store could require a trip several towns over, making such trips cost prohibitive. For others, a restriction on funds, lack of public transportation, disability, an unexpected layoff or even drought could put healthy food out of reach.
That perspective on why a person in poverty makes it less likely that someone will seek help in the way of food assistance.
“The common perception being that these individuals made poor life choices and need to live with the consequences,” Jaclyn Lindsey, a writer with Kindness.org, wrote in 2016. “This kind of societal reaction is devastating and can often exacerbate people’s already dire situations.”
And that’s true, because while poverty can cause food insecurity, it also works the other way around: Hunger spurred by a lack of nutritious food can thrust a person into poverty — or, if they’re already there, make a bad situation much worse. And that can have a myriad of cascading consequences: Numerous studies have shown that when children go hungry, their test scores are bad. Likewise, when adults go hungry, their work performance suffers, which could result in an increase in sick day utilization or even a job loss.
In recent years, city officials and food distribution partners in Winters have taken a proactive approach to combating both hunger and the stigma associated with it. Mayor Bill Biasi, Council Member Jesse Loren and City Manager John Donlevy are among the city officials who wrote letters of support of county and state funding applications for Yolo Food Bank. Loren took things one step further, sharing her own personal story about living with hunger as a college student in a mailer distributed by the food bank earlier this year.
Partnerships with CHOC/Winters Village, Rise, the First Baptist Church, Familia Church, Meals on Wheels, various farmers markets at different Winters-area schools and others have helped increase the output of nutritious food to nearly 114,000 pounds valued at over $228,000, according to 2017 data offered by the food bank. Every month, the food bank says it is serving around 560 individuals who live within the Winters city limits.
Yolo Food Bank wants those numbers to increase, and a bigger warehouse will make that possible.
“The new facility has the capacity to service 300 percent more food collection, storage and distribution activity than our previous location,” Cohan said. The construction of the new facility also brought costs down considerably for the food bank: West Sacramento-based Brown Construction agreed to build the new Yolo Food Bank complex at cost, which saved $300,000 for the food bank — money that can be reinvested in other areas such as operations and distribution.
Members of the public who are interested in seeing the new Yolo Food Bank warehouse are invited to attend a symbolic procession of food from the old office complex to the new one on Friday, March 22 at 1:30 p.m. Cohan said more than 100 people are expected to participate in the procession to the new food bank.
The new food bank warehouse is expected to be fully operational next month, with a ceremonious grand opening tentatively scheduled toward the beginning of autumn.
