Thanks to a two-year $450,000 grant from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust, local nonprofits Food Chain and Glean Kentucky will be expanding their resources and their reach, with a new teaching and processing kitchen at Food Chain and plans to extend Glean’s services to 13 additional Kentucky counties.
Half of Food Chain’s new 4,000-square-foot kitchen will be used for processing locally grown produce, while the other half will be used as an educational kitchen for cooking classes, meal planning and nutrition education for youth and families in the local community, said Rebecca Self, executive director of Food Chain. The kitchen’s food processing services will allow the group to extend the shelf-life, convenience and appeal of locally grown "seconds", including imperfect and excess fruits and vegetables from local farmers. Food Chain has additional plans to eventually expand further at its current location, the Bread Box in downtown Lexington, by adding a neighborhood green grocery to its operation, which would serve as a retail outlet down the line for some of the products processed through its new kitchen, Self said.
"The kitchen has been something we’ve actually had as part of our overarching vision since Food Chain was started in 2012," Self said. "It's been a long time in the making."
Self said the kitchen is expected to launch some programming in early 2017, ideally ramping up its operation in conjunction with the spring growing season. The processing kitchen is expected to create five part-time jobs when it comes online in 2017, while the grocery would eventually also require full-time staffing.
Self said the grant from the Kenan Charitable Trust represents Food Chain's largest gift to date. The kitchen project has also benefited from additional donations, including agrant last year from the Knight Foundation and a recent crowdfunding campaign that garnered donations from more than 100 supporters. Additional support and in-kind donations for the teaching and processing kitchen have come from Traditional Bank, Crawford Builders and Tate Hill Jacobs Architects, Self said.
With its portion of the grant money, Glean Kentucky will expand its reach from its current work in Fayette, Franklin, Scott and Madison counties to include Woodford, Clark, Jessamine and Bourbon counties by 2017, said Ben Southworth, development coordinator for Glean. Glean also plans to further extend its services across the Bluegrass after that, to include Harrison, Nicholas, Powell, Estill, Anderson, Mercer, Boyle, Lincoln and Garrett counties by 2020.
Glean Kentucky works to reduce food waste by collecting imperfect or excess produce from farmers, retail grocers and other organizations and distributing it through partner agencies such as the Hope Center and the Catholic Action Center to food-insecure households in the communities it serves. The grant will allow Glean and Food Chain to partner in making better use of the produce collected, Southworth said.
Donations to Glean often come in the form of large quantities of a single type of perishable produce, such as a field of excess, ripe bell peppers or a truckload of blueberries, Southworth said.
“While they are greatly appreciated, it’s kind of difficult to adequately and effectively distribute that without oversaturating our partner agencies,” Southworth said.
Food Chain’s processing kitchen will give Glean the opportunity to extend the usefulness of the excess food it collects and provide it to partnering groups in ways that are more accessible and easy to distribute, Southworth said.
Through its partnering agencies, Glean currently serves an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 individuals per year, Southworth said. Through the initial four-county expansion of its services, the group expects to serve an estimated 20,000 more people annually.