Feeding America's 2015 Map the Meal Gap is a stark reminder of our challenge to meet the needs of growing numbers of people in our community who struggle with food insecurity. This year's Map the Meal Gap data revealed these key local findings in our service area:• The meal gap grew from 57 million in 2012 to 59. 5 million in 2013; • The overall food insecurity rate increased from 13. 4 percent to 13. 8 percent; • The child food insecurity rate increased from 19. 2 percent to 20. 2 percent; • The number of food insecure individuals increased from 325,520 to 336,690; • The number of food insecure children increased from 93,980 to 97,540; and• The cost of a meal increased from $2. 75 to $2. 79. Decreasing the Meal Gap – ensuring that all southwestern Pennsylvanians have reliable access to food – will require the continued efforts of our staff and advocates to effectively source and distribute food, engage our community and speak out about hunger to our elected officials. The Food Bank adopted a new strategic plan in September 2015. Our Board, executive leadership and staff know that to make our vision of a hunger-free southwestern Pennsylvania a reality, we must adopt a bold vision for the future. As part of the Feeding America Opportunity Accelerator initial cohort, the Food Bank is establishing a strategic goal to lead the community in eliminating the meal gap by 2025 and helping people we serve to stabilize their lives.

Objectives identified in our current strategic plan demonstrate how the Food Bank has invested its time, energy, resources and passion to:Feed: Implement innovative, quality-focused distribution strategies to foster a high-quality client experience. Objectives include:• Identify and establish new ways to give food away to people who need it. • Define the key indicators of success in "quality access to food" and create a scoring system for pantries and programs. • Establish sustainable ways to sell healthy food in food deserts. • Establish and implement standards/goals for nutritional content and product mix of food we distribute. Lead: Develop an exceptional network of engaged PDOs and member agencies that provide quality access to food. Objectives include:• Develop and implement a new process for agency membership that enlists high-performing agencies, prepares them to provide service in identified areas of need, and serves as a model for PDOs to replicate. • Create, communicate and enforce member network standards that promote a quality client experience. • Segment agencies into categories based upon set criteria that will enable GPCFB to more effectively evaluate performance, allocate resources, and work strategically with members of the network. • Establish a Network Excellence Academy designed to address member educational needs and provide opportunities to build network capacity. Engage: Grow community engagement through strategic public education, advocacy and media relations campaigns that promote the mission of the Food Bank. Objectives include:• Establish the Food Bank's brand in the region and nationally. • Develop a comprehensive public education program that provides specific audiences with information, resources and motivation to end hunger in our region. • Build upon the Food Bank's local, regional and national position as a leader in the anti-hunger movement. • Increase the breadth of participation in Food Bank activities by corporate and individual volunteers. • Create a Communications Department that is responsive, anticipatory and effective in providing strategy, leadership, materials and support to GPCFB personnel, departments, programs and initiatives. Support: Develop integrated processes that support the mission and goals of the Food Bank. Objectives include:• Create a data model (visualization) for the organization. • Create a network portal that provides a single point of entry for PDOs and member agencies. • Develop a client level information system. • Identify, map and improve key business processes. • Create an online, mobile, app-based brand presence that is consistent and appealing.

Our primary goal at the Food Bank is to decrease the Meal Gap and reduce food insecurity in southwestern Pennsylvania. To do so will take all of us working together. By recognizing the size of the challenge, and what factors impact it year in and year out, we can work throughout our region to develop effective and efficient ways to meet it. The Food Bank traditionally sets our annual goals and objectives based on pounds of food distributed and numbers of people served during the prior year. These traditional metrics populate the Map the Meal Gap report and help the Feeding America network understand hunger and the efforts of food banks nationwide to meet that need. We measure:• Cost per pound delivered which defines our whole cost per pound, not just the cost of procuring and/or handling food products. On average, we know that processed foods cost us around 59 cents per pound and that produce costs us around 13 cents per pound to source, ship, handle and deliver. • Percent of enabled pounds which counts the portion of food we help to distribute without ever physically touching it. When the Food Bank connects a farmer with excess apples in Washington County to a food pantry in Washington County and helps that pantry directly receive those apples, we eliminate the costs associated with shipping the apples to Allegheny County and then back to Washington County. Whenever possible, we push to enable the delivery of food rather than warehouse it here at our facility. • Meals per person in need which captures every pound of food we help bring to our 11-county network whether that is an enabled pound (like the Washington County apples), a physical pound (like the oranges we buy from California, ship to our warehouse and distribute in trucks to our members and partners) or a virtual pound (like the milk and eggs our neighbors in need are able to purchase when we help them enroll in SNAP benefits). All those meals count toward meeting the need in our community. We realize that goals set and measured by these metrics do not offer the most comprehensive picture of our collective impact, nor are they the most effective means by which to measure our impact in the region. As a result, the Food Bank is actively evaluating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software options to help us understand more about the people we help and how we help them. Currently, we know exactly how many families attend each Produce to People distribution. What we don't know is whether a family who picks up 55 pounds of fresh food at Produce to People at our distribution in Duquesne is also visiting the Squirrel Hill Food Pantry for additional help in feeding their family. We know that having a better understanding of the needs and demands of our neighbors will help us make more strategic decisions about where, when and how to use our resources.

As we continue to strive to eliminate hunger in southwestern Pennsylvania, our success will be evaluated through our ability to accomplish the goals and objectives described above. Over the next year, we will work to streamline our processes, examine and improve the efficiency of our programs and operations, focus our resources on establishing our baselines and developing more meaningful metrics to guide our decisions, evaluate our impact and improve our distribution strategies. In addition to quantitative measures, our success will also be evaluated through feedback provided by our partner agencies, the people we serve, our volunteers, our donors, other stakeholders and our staff. Feedback may be collected through surveys, focus groups, agency site visits, interviews, our food assistance hotline and our website.

Over the past year, the Food Bank has worked diligently and efficiently to meet and exceed our goals. Our accomplishments during Fiscal Year 2014-15 included:• Distributing 22,315,265 meals in our 11-county service area; • Engaging 14,568 volunteers who contributed 54,232 hours valued at $1,138,842; • Hosting 193 Produce to People distributions, serving 17 distressed neighborhoods in our region and distributing nearly 3. 5 million pounds of food and non-food products; • Expanding our Summer Food Service Outreach Program in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Lawrence and Somerset Counties. Through our efforts, we reached more than 15,000 children at 401 partnering sites and served 879,073 meals to children during summer 2014 – more than 44,000 more meals than the previous summer; • Coordinating the Community Table program to pair 72 local restaurants with food assistance agencies in our service area to provide pre-cooked meals to people in need; • Collecting 273,366 pounds of donated food and non-food products through community food drives; • Collecting 753,845 pounds of fresh, donated food from 114 local farms; • Harvesting 108,999 pounds of produce that otherwise would have gone to waste from local farms during 32 gleaning sessions; and• Providing 6,361,877 pounds of healthy produce to people in need throughout the region.