The Foodbank of Santa Barbara County opened its South County Sharehouse at the beginning of the month. It's capable of storing more than 1 million pounds of disaster-dedicated food.
"Food insecurity can strike anyone at any time whether it’s people who are hungry or a natural disaster. It could be any sort of loss, so its not just the low-income community, it can truly be anyone," says Kevin Easter.
Easter and Cole Beattie with Unity Shoppe, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit, are one of 200 countywide organizations picking up weekly shipments of food from the foodbank's new Sharehouse.
"One thing that we were constrained in in the past is freezer space, but with this new addition, that food bank, the walk-in freezer, it's allowed us to then deliver and distribute more food," Easter said.
The Sharehouse is a 33,000 square-foot space that has a 2,700 square-foot cold storage helping keep fruits, veggies and frozen items fresh longer.
"The cold storage is key. We’re in one of the top 1% of agricultural producing counties in America and our cooler freezer will allow us to store 10 times what we were storing in South County before," says foodbank CEO Erik Talkin.
Talkin says Santa Barbara County has the second-highest poverty rate among California counties.
"So that means there's an incredible amount of food insecurity here," Talkin says.
And since 2020 things haven’t changed.
"Demand has stayed stubbornly at about 50% more than it was pre-COVID," explains Talkin.
Since opening its doors in Goleta on March 1st, the foodbank has been working hard to fill shelves at the Sharehouse.
"The sharehouse is an amazing facility but it's not full," Talkin says.
Stocking the building is reliant on donations of food or money from the community.
"If you give us a dollar, we can turn that into $10 of purchasing power, which is an amazing tool," explains Talkin.
"Just a varying amount of different types of food that we can, you know, get to hungry mouths," Beattie says.
To donate or volunteer visit foodbanksbc.org
