Food Bank of Delaware

The mission of the Food Bank of Delaware is to inspire hope in our communities by providing food to nourish Delawareans, while collaborating on long-term solutions to hunger and poverty.

A community free of hunger.

Goal One: Feed (Get Food Distributed): The Food Bank of Delaware is focused on closing gaps with direct distributions to get the right food to the right partners at the right time.

Goal Two: Transform: We continue to focus on economic empowerment through workforce and community development programs.

Goal Three: Unite: Increase awareness of food insecurity and inspire action to create a community free of hunger.

The organization has experienced significant growth across our organizational chart adding needed staff to ensure efficient service delivery. This has allowed the organization to create needed layers of supervisory structure, creating more opportunities for leadership development and professional growth for Food Bank employees. FBD has created a professional development/management training curriculum encouraging staff at all levels to grow professionally in their current positions and look for internal opportunities when available. FBD has collaborated with Delaware Technical Community College to design a five-week training program. Monthly organizational alignment meetings have started as well bringing together all staff with supervisory responsibilities to discuss highlights and challenges they are facing in accomplishing their goals.

The Food Bank takes great pride in having high engagement amongst the employees. This is evidenced by a recent employee survey that was conducted with an overall employee engagement score of 86%. The values that organization lives by, compassion, collaboration, diversity, inclusiveness, empowerment and innovation all tie into our highly engaged employees. The culture is the same on the Newark campus as well as on the Milford campus in that we believe in “One Foodbank.” The organization is conscious and deliberate in terms of what is done in one location its is then replicated at the other location as much as possible. The evolution is a result of changes in key leadership positions, more specifically, the CEO and Milford Branch Operations Manager. This has helped us unify the two locations. The Milford Branch Operations Manager is now a part of the leadership team, so we are always cognizant of what is happening in Milford and what they need. With the change in the CEO two years ago, she has been able to positively change the direction of the organization as a whole by again, living by our core values and essentially walking the talk. Leadership of the organization listens to employees, valuing their input and through a sense of trust that was not there previously.