Idaho Food bank volunteers

Kia Shaw, branch manager for the Idaho Food Bank, talks about the combined duties of her staff, as well as the contribution made by so many volunteers. I have a staff of ten here and we can't do it all, so we have a lot of volunteers to come in and come in and help. Last year alone, the amount of hours our volunteers served was equivalent to seven full time employees. So we really do rely heavily on our volunteers and the work that they do. So that way we can get food out to our local communities, to our partner agencies who can then distribute it out to the communities. When it comes to food bank employees and volunteers, they generally do different work. For example, like we won't have volunteers driving our trucks or really working directly with our partner agencies. A lot of our volunteers will actually bag bulk food, so we bring in bulk oats in these huge 2,000 pound bags. We need to bag them into family sized portions. And so our volunteers do a lot of that work. They bag them into one or 2 pound bags. They will build food boxes that are going to go to our partner agencies or mobile pantries. So that way our mobile pantries can get them out to the community very easily and a variety of other products. They also bag produce. We bring in bulk produce from different growers around the region and we bag it up against makes it easier to distribute. My staff doesn't usually do that. The staff usually will do the order picking, they'll do the driving, they'll do a lot of the fundraising, a lot of the background work that happens in a food bank. And thanks to the combined effort of volunteers and Idaho food Bank employees, nobody in Idaho has to go hungry.