The nonprofit has an opportunity to tell the story of how the organization adapted to tremendous external changes in the last year.
Nourish Now has adapted tremendously over the past year. Before the pandemic, an estimated 70,000 Montgomery County, Maryland residents were considered food insecure. Today, the figure is estimated at 100,000 by the Montgomery Food Council and projects the figure to be 140,000 by the end of 2021. Because of the negative economic impact of COVID-19, those in dire need have been depending on high-fat, fast food, which can have adverse health effects. With the COVID-19 crisis affecting Montgomery County and the Washington, DC metro region, as well as the rest of the world, area residents who have lost their jobs or already have been living in shelters or are homeless are now in even more dire need of help. Among residents in communities struggling with even deeper food insecurity due to the COVID-19 crisis are children who no longer have access to the Free and Reduced Meals Program (FARM), which has been suspended. To help residents overcome this food insecurity and to offer them an alternative to fast food, Nourish Now the developed the Multi-Cultural Mobile Food Assistance Program in Spring 2020. Since then, we have distributed more than 8.2 million pounds of healthful food to more than 400,000 area residents struggling with food insecurity, exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. The Multi-Cultural Mobile Food Assistance Program distributes food to a dozen sites throughout Montgomery County. Among these sites are houses of worship, COVID-19 vaccination locations that are in lower income areas, and government housing developments. At the sites, we provide Family Relief Boxes consisting of prepared meals and fresh produce for a family of four for five days. A total of 100% of those whom we serve through our Multi-Cultural Mobile Food Assistance Program have low-moderate-incomes. To identify those neighborhoods in which these residents in need live, we use data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Montgomery County Government regarding low income and high unemployment.