President & CEO Message
After my first complete year as President & CEO, I can safely say I am immensely proud of the work we do, and the way we do it, to feed the 374,000 Utahns facing hunger. With an amazing staff, aided by an army of volunteers, and the support of our community, we distributed 45.7 million pounds of food last year. That's 38 million meals! It was the highest distribution year in our 115-year history, a milestone that’s hard to celebrate when the number of food-insecure Utahns had been declining in the past few years. This indicates that while there may be fewer Utahns facing hunger, they are needing more help, and for longer periods of Ginette Bott President & CEO time, than before.
The growth and success of our Mobile School Pantry program in recent years has been remarkable. At the same time, it uncovered an unexpected need—the lack of resources at some of our local schools is so great that food needs to be available to students and their families every day. To that end, we expanded our in-school pantry program, which is now offered in 23 local schools and universities. Adding in-school pantries has enabled us to expand our Mobile School Pantry program, adding new locations in Utah and Washington Counties, which raised our total to 69 sites.
Kent Liston 2019 also brought with it a federal government shutdown. This crisis was unlike any we had seen in recent Chief Financial Officer history. It shone a light on the many Americans struggling to keep afloat, with millions just one financial setback away from disaster. During this uncertain time, we increased distribution to food pantries in areas most impacted by the shutdown, ensuring their shelves were stocked for the additional demand. We also took our Mobile Pantry truck to the Salt Lake City airport to offer emergency food assistance to the furloughed TSA workers.
We couldn’t have accomplished any of this without the generosity of our community, which is still our leading source of funding, accounting for 41% of our financial donations last year. In addition, our support network of food donors enables us to use donated funds to transport food to our 182 partner agencies Scott Woodhead across the state free-of-charge. Concurrently, volunteers did the work of 52 full-time employees! If we had Chief Operations Officer to pay staff members to accomplish these tasks, we wouldn't be able to say with pride that only 4% of every dollar raised goes towards administrative costs. So when we say the three things we need are food, time, and money, we mean it, and we can’t thank our supporters enough for their commitment to helping us in our mission of Fighting Hunger Statewide. We got more out of every dollar donated.
donated Year-End Snapshot Accountability Cents of Every Dollar Donated Went to = . ungry Utahns orth of goods and services ids Cafe Program