Washington Food Coalition Programs
We are the unified voice for a strong emergency food system. WFC’s mission is to actively educate and network with organizations that strive to alleviate hunger in Washington State. To that end, we provide educational resources to emergency food programs and others that may impact hunger in our communities and have developed a cohesive, unified voice for hunger programs in Washington State. The agencies across the state are stretched thin in their capacity, and they desperately rely on our support for networking and resources through coalition building.
There are many ways that we support hunger relief agencies both in Seattle and across the state. We plan and conduct an annual 2-day conference, host regional workshops, maintain a resource library, prepare and distribute a monthly newsletter packed with current information, maintain a web page rich with resources, provide meeting facilitation and mediation services and advocate on behalf of emergency food programs on relevant state and federal food and nutrition issues. The resources and networking we provide to hunger relief programs is invaluable to our members and our network is the only all-inclusive statewide network for emergency food providers
Recent Successes and Current Challenges
This year more than 2000 representatives of emergency food providers, human and community service organizations, government agencies and the companies and organizations that serve them participated in nearly 50 workshops, tours, panels and presentations, ranging from Organic Farms to Best Practices, Roundtables, Food Safety, Fundraising, Community Gardens and much more.
Our members have seen a 35% increase in clients over the last 4 years, and our support has helped them manage to keep up with this extraordinary demand. 1 in 6 Washingtonians now find themselves food insecure, and unfortunately 1 in 4 children in Washington struggle with hunger. The resources we provide to our coalition aims to first meet these astonishing current needs for hunger relief, but then ultimately to collaboratively seek out ways to bring down the number of people struggling with hunger.