Community Action Partnership of Kern called upon the Kern County community in order to help Feed the Need—an annual event that CAPK does in partnership with the Kern County Fair by offering free admissions to those who bring cans in increments of six.
It may have been triple digits in temperature, but that didn’t stop the community from bringing 25,638 pounds of food, equaling around 21,412 meals.
(Jocelynn Landon)
Kelly Lowery, CAPK food bank administrator, explained that their goal is to stock the shelves of the food bank in order to offer assistance to the people in Kern that need help when it comes to food resources.
“Last year [CAPK food bank] supplied over 20 million pounds of food, to food insecure residents and neighbors all over Kern County, from Delano in the north to Frazier Park in the south… We are just trying to help people who have a need for a little bit of extra assistance when it comes to food,” said Lowery.
Around January of last year, CAPK food banks received about 100 thousand engagements when it came to the community needing emergency food assistance, 18 months later they are around 200 thousand engagements per month.
There are many ways that CAPK can try to meet the needs, one main way is CAPK asking the community to help out and get involved.
“We have a lot of partnerships in collaborations with the school districts this year, some of the churches for the concert tonight, other county departments… we’re busy, we’re excited, and we’re seeing a lot of cans starting to come through,” said Savannah Oates, PR and Advocacy Manager at CAPK.
Oates said that this doesn’t have to be a one-time collaboration, and there are ways to collaborate outside of the annual Feed the Need event such as volunteering at the food bank like Valley Strong Credit Union, or donating food and jackets to CAPK’s head start program like Kern Health Systems.
