Tour de Gap Sponsor Spotlight - Food Bank

The Tour de Gap doesn't happen without a lot of help from people and businesses in the community. These people give their help quite willingly because they know that the Tour de Gap benefits a great cause - the Food Bank of West Central Texas. To show our appreciation to these sponsors, we will be having sponsor spotlights on our blog throughout this month. To start things off, it might be good to highlight the reason behind the ride - the Food Bank.

In the 13 county service area of the Food Bank of West Central Texas (FBWCT), approximately 50,000 people live in poverty and too often miss meals or experience hunger. The Food Bank's clients include working-poor families with needy children, seniors subsisting on fixed incomes, and possibly even you or your neighbors in times of disaster. Nearly 30% of the families seeking emergency food have at least one member working. "Under-employment" leaves families with low incomes needing help just to provide basic nutrition.

While one out of every five adults and one out of every four children in the Big Country lives in poverty and has difficulty meeting basic nutritional needs, enormous quantities of surplus food are available from the the food industry and food manufacturers. That is where the Food Bank comes in. Since 1983, the mission of the FBWCT has been "helping to fight hunger in the Big Country by providing food to non-profit organizations that feed the hungry."

The FBWCT distributes emergency food through 150 partner agencies in 13 counties of West Central Texas (Fisher, Jones, Shackelford, Stephens, Mitchell, Nolan, Taylor, Callahan, Eastland, Runnels, Coleman, Brown, and Comanche). Our partner agencies include church pantries, soup kitchens, emergency shelters, after school programs serving disadvantaged children, daycare centers, senior citizen centers, and rehabilitation facilities. Sometimes saving and always seeking to improve lives, these agencies are literally the safety net for Texas' Big Country. By partnering with the FBWCT, these agencies vastly extend their own wonderful missions. This could mean an additional home counselor at an abused women's shelter, or the ability to pay the medication costs of a senior choosing between food and medication.

As our community's #1 safety net for hungry people, the FBWCT has a remarkable ability to recover fresh, frozen, canned, and boxed food and to redistribute it to those who are in need. In fact, for every $10 donated, we provide enough food for 45 meals - an amazing multiplier effect that is rarely matched in the non-profit community.

The FBWCT recovers food from national manufacturers and retailers, supermarkets, food distributors, the USDA, farmers, wholesalers, sportsmen, and through food and fund drives. In the last year, the FBWCT distributed 3 million pounds of emergency food representing an annual wholesale value to our community of $4,650,000.

As you can see, the Food Bank provides an essential service to our community. For more information about the Food Bank and to read more about their programs, visit www.fbwct.org .
You can help the Food Bank by participating in the Tour de Gap. All of your entry fee goes to them. If they can provide 45 meals for every $10, that means your entry fee can provide food for 135 meals! That's impressive. Many thanks go out to the Food Bank and their employees for all the work they do for our community. Let's help them as much as we can!