By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
In 1999, when Jewish Family Service renovated its food bank, it had a clientele of about 625 per month in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and throughout the Jewish community. Today, that number exceeds 1,500 individual visitors a month — far more than the agency served even a year ago.
“We are now really crunched in here,” Ken Weinberg, CEO of Jewish Family Service, told JTNews in May. “We have a food bank, the lines are extending quite far, and we need a facility that can handle the new needs of the community.”
Weinberg had expressed hope for the possibility of federal funding, and on Tuesday, JFS announced that the Morris Polack Food Bank had received up to $500,000 from the City of Seattle as a part of the Community Development Block Grant funds made available through the federal stimulus package.
According to a news release from JFS, construction on the expansion will begin next month and is expected to be completed by December. The project will double the food bank’s size to about 2,600 square feet — most of that being storage space, including an additional walk-in cooler, and will alleviate the need to store excess food off-site.
JFS’s associate director Claudia Berman said she was excited about the way the expansion will streamline operations.
“We’ll have our ability to receive food and to stock it and move it for food bank use,” Berman said. “We’ll have whatever’s necessary to move food efficiently.”
A new checkout system will allow clients to choose their own food from the shelves instead of having to take pre-bagged items. During the construction period, the agency will rely more heavily on home delivery and consolidate the food bank’s hours of operation to ensure its clients get fed.
JFS is the only local food bank to receive funding, said Sara Levin, deputy director of the city’s human services dept. The money comes from $3.2 million in community development funding the city received from the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development office, based upon a formula allocation.
Funding requirements specified that any facility expansion be “shovel-ready,” or prepared to start work within 120 days, Levin said, though that timeline eventually changed.
“This was what made JFS rise to the top: Projects that had plans, permits ready to go, and what they really needed was the last piece of funding to move the project forward,” Levin said.
According to Berman, until the project is bid out to a contractor, the actual cost of the expansion is undetermined, but will likely run between $350,000 and $500,000.