Arlington Food Assistance Center

The Arlington Food Assistance Center (AFAC) is dedicated to providing supplemental groceries to Arlington residents who cannot afford to purchase sufficient food to meet their basic needs. While our only mission is to feed the hungry, by relieving the food budget of our clients, we help prevent homelessness and allow our clients to make other necessary purchases without sacrificing their health, housing and nutritional needs. We provide groceries to families and individuals referred to us by the Arlington County Department of Human Services, other social service agencies, and the churches of Arlington. AFAC obtains surplus food at a minimal cost from wholesale suppliers and at no cost from private donors, local bakeries, supermarkets, farmers' markets and food drives.

Since 1988, the Arlington Food Assistance Center remains dedicated to its simple but critical missio

Goal One: Expansion of our services to nearby areas where there exists a high degree of food insecurity outside of Arlington County.

Goal Two: Extend existing hours for those who cannot get to us during the day.

Goal Three: The addition of new food items that are more culturally appropriate for our families, and improve the quantity and quality of the foods we provide our families.

Since most of our leadership are senior executives with great experience and are all women to a person, our focus has been on the training of our younger staff members in the critical skills, knowledge, and experiences they will need to operate our organization and replace our older staff when they retire. In the last 4 months we have focused our attention on the development of staff training programs and our on-boarding process to better integrate new staff with the existing staff and give them what is needed to function in their roles. This includes modules on safety, the proper handling of food to how to conduct performance evaluations of subordinate staff, leadership principles for mid-level staff, office software essentials, and finance. We have utilized the services of a number of consulting organizations and that of our preferred employer organization (PEO) and their online training programs to provide many of these offerings.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect low-income families, causing more families to seek AFAC’s services to help feed their loved ones. Our Client Services and Operations staff carefully monitor the weekly and monthly client visits to our food distributions and make adjustments to service as needed. In September 2021, we re-opened our Thursday evening food distributions to give working families and individuals an alternative day and time to pick up groceries that better fit their schedules. As the prevalence of positive COVID-19 cases dropped, AFAC expanded the Home Delivery program to help serve more clients who have trouble accessing our facilities and do not have a support system. Last year, supply chain and transportation issues led to an increase in food prices and longer delivery items for certain items. AFAC was never in danger of running out of food, as we forecast and order food from vendors several weeks in advance.