See how IOCP is updating with the help of FFEN staff and volunteers
FFEN leverages the work of skilled pro bono volunteers as it assists food shelf leaders in reimagining their spaces.
The staff at FFEN oversees a group of eight project managers and 11 layout design volunteers who work with food shelves across the state. These volunteers play a key role in bringing FFEN’s approach and tools to local communities.
“These volunteers lend their expertise and experience to food shelf projects allowing FFEN to best steward our donor dollars,” said Kate Burggraff, FFEN’s executive director. “Food shelves receive recommendations from industry professionals who are able to work with food shelf leaders to adapt best practices to each particular food shelf context.”
Skilled volunteers focus on:
“As food shelves get more and more complex, the work FFEN is doing is crucial. As a food shelf we would never have been able to add a LEAN expert, a project manager, a retail experience coordinator, and an architect to our team. That would be a crazy level of complexity. We don’t have the time to reach out to even one of the experts, let alone a whole group of them.”
Andy Swerine, IOCP Food Shelf Manager
- The best ways to incorporate and manage fresh food coming into a food shelf, to reduce waste and get more food out to more people.
- Designing the space to create a sense of welcome while providing efficient traffic flow.
- Prioritizing what food shelf shoppers will see first as they enter the space. Placing items that are most important to shoppers up front, like fresh produce, can reduce worry and anxiety as they come into the food shelf.
- Training food shelf leaders and volunteers to stock and fill the shelves, creating a food shelf that looks welcoming and abundant and is filled with fresh foods.
- Identifying process improvement strategies at each site and assisting food shelf leaders in implementing the changes..
Recently, a 5-person FFEN team provided oversight and guidance for a space re-design project at Plymouth’s Interfaith Outreach and Community Partners (IOCP) Food Shelf.
There, Jack Tift of Mortenson Construction, and a FFEN volunteer, offered a LEAN event to ask IOCP volunteers and staff about their processes and procedures. From that event, Tift and the FFEN team put together a list of recommendations for the food shelf.
Karen Randall, a project manager volunteer with FFEN, said the recommendations included the following:
- Stop bagging produce, allowing shoppers to choose which and how many fruits and vegetables they need. This move, she said, saved volunteer time, cut down on plastic bag use, saved money and gave shoppers the chance to take home only what they could use, reducing food waste.
- Label all boxes of perishable foods coming into the warehouse to ensure fresh food that came into the space first, goes out the door first, reducing spoilage.
- Reconfigure the layout of the food shelf to provide more sorting space for volunteers, changing the placement of shelving.
Because of donor support, FFEN can work with food shelves like IOCP, and this year is on track to work with 299 other food shelves across the state. Now through Nov. 21, your donation to FFEN will be doubled, please support this critical work by making a gift today.
