By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
Second Harvest Community Food Bank is seeking input on how it best can serve the area’s senior citizens.
Last month Second Harvest held summits and gained input on how it can best serve children. Now, Second Harvest moves to the other end of the spectrum.
The St. Joseph food bank will hold three Senior Hunger summits to gain input on how to serve senior citizens in need.
CEO Chad Higdon says he and his staff are going into these listening sessions with no expectations and an open mind
"When you look at bringing all these folks together to get feedback on your services and programs, you really do have to go into it without a sense of where you want to go, because you don't know what you're going to hear," Higdon tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post.
Higdon says getting people around the table and getting feedback will help Second Harvest as they evaluate their strategy.
Higdon says the food bank divides its programs into children's initiatives, senior citizen initiatives, and family initiatives.
Higdon says Second Harvest is working to update its strategic plan, and to do that officials have scheduled these listening sessions.
"So, we had some great feedback with our Childrens Hunger Summits and got some great feedback on how we serve kids and things we're doing to really support backpack buddies and school pantries and summer feeding," Higdon says. "And now this next iteration is really focused on what seniors need."
Higdon says Second Harvest serves many elderly residents and the food bank is searching for the best ways to better support them.
Three listening sessions have been scheduled. The first one will be on October 27th at LifePoint Church in Chillicothe at 434 Locust Street.
Higdon says sometimes Second Harvest officials don't know how critical the need is unless they get out and ask.
"So, we do have senior box programs where we're packing monthly food distributions, some of those are delivered to individual homes by volunteers, we may be working with another agency or somewhere outside of St. Joseph to try to get to these individuals," Higdon explains.
Higdon says the purpose of holding these forums is to get insight into the existing services and hear what is being done well and what can be done better.
Listening sessions will also be held on November 3rd at The Event Center at Mozingo Lake Recreation Park located at 1 Fall Drive in Maryville and November 6th at the Joyce Patterson Center located at 100 South 10th in St. Joseph.