The Coralville Community Food Pantry partners with its community to help meet the basic needs for food and personal care items for those who need assistance. Individuals and families can visit the pantry once a week to select from an array high-quality food and personal care items.
The pantry believes that no child or adult in the community should have to worry about where their next meal will come from — they hope to transform Coralville into a hunger-free community.
The pantry was established in 2009 by a coalition of local churches. It now draws broad support from countless businesses, schools, community groups, and individuals as well. With this generous support from the local community, the pantry was able to help more than 2,500 Coralville residents last year.
Here are some of the Coralville Community Food Pantry's accomplishments:
- 2,612 total individuals served
- 922 total families served
- 8,508 total pantry visits
- 249,420 pounds of food distributed
- 10,545 meals made available to children during school breaks
- 1,200 garden seed packets distributed
- 154 individuals served through free mealThere are four main assistance programs.
Weekly Food Assistance lets food insecure families and individuals visit the pantry once to a week to freely select food and personal care items that best suit their unique needs.
School Break Nutrition helps Coralville families with limited resources, who count on subsidized school meals to ensure that their children receive adequate nourishment feed their kids when school is not in session.
The pantry’s Seed Library promotes gardening and healthy food choices by making heirloom vegetable seeds freely available to food pantry clients and community gardeners.
The Free Community Meals are the food pantry's effort to build community around healthy eating and de-stigmatize hunger and poverty by bringing the entire community to the same dinner table. Each meal draws between 150-200 people from different backgrounds who prepare, serve, eat, listen, learn and teach alongside one another.
This year the pantry plans to serve 2,700 Coralville residents, distribute 300,000 pounds of food, provide 20,000 meal equivalents to Coralville children, distribute 1,500 seed packets and increase the number of Free Community Meals to four.
As part of Frontier Co-op's 2017 local giving, we made a donation of $20,000 to help the Coralville Community Food Pantry continue to provide hope and nourishment to their community.