Abilene Food Pantry Schedule: https://www.fbwct.org/abilene-pantry-schedule/
In the 13 county service area of the Food Bank of West Central Texas (FBWCT), approximately 50,000 people live in poverty and too often miss meals or experience hunger. The Food Bank’s clients include working-poor families with needy children, seniors subsisting on fixed incomes, and possibly even you or your neighbors in times of disaster. Nearly 30% percent of the families seeking emergency food have at least one member working. “Under-employment” leaves families with low incomes needing help just to provide basic nutrition. While one out of every five adults and one out of every four children in the Big Country lives in poverty and has difficulty meeting basic nutritional needs, enormous quantities of surplus food are available from the food industry and food manufacturers. That is where the Food Bank comes in. Since 1983, the mission of the FBWCT has been “helping to fight hunger in the Big Country by providing food to non-profit organizations that feed the hungry.” The FBWCT distributes emergency food through 150 partner agencies in 13 counties of West Central Texas (Fisher, Jones, Shackelford, Stephens, Mitchell, Nolan, Taylor, Callahan, Eastland, Runnels, Coleman, Brown, and Comanche). Our partner agencies include church pantries, soup kitchens, emergency shelters, after school programs serving disadvantaged children, daycare centers, senior citizen centers, and rehabilitation facilities. Sometimes saving and always seeking to improve lives, these agencies are literally the safety net for Texas’ Big Country. By partnering with the FBWCT, these agencies vastly extend their own wonderful missions. This could mean an additional home counselor at an abused women’s shelter, a sports or art program at a home for troubled children, or the ability to pay the medication costs of a senior choosing between food and medication. For every $10 donated, the Food Bank provides enough food for 45 meals – an amazing multiplier effect rarely matched in the non-profit community. As our community’s # 1 safety net for hungry people, the FBWCT has a remarkable ability to recover fresh, frozen, canned, and boxed food and to redistribute it to those who are in need. In fact, for every ten dollars donated, we provide enough food for 45 meals – an amazing multiplier effect that is rarely matched in the non-profit community. The FBWCT recovers food from national manufacturers and retailers, supermarkets, food distributors, the USDA, farmers, wholesalers, sportsmen, and through food and fund drives. In the last year, the FBWCT distributed 3 million pounds of emergency food representing an annual wholesale value to our community of $4,650,000.
