With the new Gleaners site and another $12 million building food rescue Forgotten Harvest has underway, Southeast Michigan will have, for the first time ever, enough capacity to meet the need for emergency food assistance in the counties the two serve, Gleaners CEO Gerry Brisson said.
“Creating a hunger-free community has to include building a safety net that is the right size as well as flexible as need in the community grows and shrinks,” Brisson said.
Both organizations were facing logistical and capacity challenges with existing sites even before the pandemic. And both had to lease properties to keep up with demand last year.
Their facility expansions will ensure their distribution infrastructure will not be a problem going forward, Brisson said. Assuming adequate emergency food is available for distribution, the two agencies will have capacity to distribute more food. And that will enable people to focus on solving the roots causes of hunger.
“When we can take hunger off the table for people in need, we enable them to have the energy and time to work on their next challenge – be that health, employment, or even just paying the rent,” Brisson said.
Last June, as Gleaners was working to meet rising demand for emergency food assistance, the Taylor building near I-94 and Southfield Freeway went up for sale.
The food bank had been in the market for a new site going back to 2018 when it first hit annual distribution of 40 million pounds of food. But with nothing available, it shifted to plans to construct a new distribution center on its Detroit campus. It gained needed property through a land swap with the Solanus Casey Center and began fundraising for the project, which it projected would have cost $40 million, Brisson said.
But it had to secure more space to meet need during the pandemic. Like Forgotten Harvest, Gleaners was forced to lease additional space last year to meet surging demand. In 2020, it supplied over 80 million pounds of food, much of it from government-funded programs, to pantries, soup kitchens and pickup locations for families, double the amount it provided in 2019.
The former Dairy Fresh site, a 1960s building that originally served as the headquarters for Highland Appliance, fit Gleaners’ needs perfectly, Brisson said, and saved it $25 million.
The food bank is funding the building purchase and renovations of it and its Detroit headquarters through a mix of reserves, debt and fundraising, Brisson said. Gleaners is operating on annual budget for fiscal 2021 is $32.7 million, up from $21 million in 2020.
When the Taylor building is ready in July, Gleaners plans to shift the bulk of its inventory and food distribution operations from Detroit and leased space at the Salvation Army in Warren there.A t 180,896 square feet, the site is more than double the size of Gleaners’ Detroit building.
It will also renovate portions of its Detroit headquarters where its administrative offices, pantry pickup operations, nutrition education and the bulk of its volunteer activities will remain, Brisson said.
Other sites in Howell, Pontiac and Taylor will continue to serve as pickup sites for pantries and people needing food assistance, as well as some volunteers, for now, he said.
“Eventually, we’ll start consolidating. Warren will be the first site we exit,” Brisson said.
“In the next 12-18 months, we’ll start thinking about our footprint and what make sense to keep and what makes sense to sell. If we grow, then some of our facilities may (later) be useful to us for food distribution,” for food distribution partnerships with health care systems, for example, he said.
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