Ozarks Food Harvest has run out of space to store the food it distributes to the 270 food pantries, programs and feeding sites it serves. The O’Reilly Center for Hunger Relief in north Springfield is no longer large enough to meet the need for food aid in the area. When OFH opened its new facility in north Springfield eight years ago, it was providing enough food for five million meals in the Ozarks. Now, the food bank is distributing enough for fifteen million.
"But we really need to be doing about 30 million meals a year due to the identified gap that we've seen in our area," said OFH executive director, Bart Brown.
Because of that, the food bank has been raising money for a 56,000 square-foot expansion on land it already owns next to its current building.
"The new facility is going to be bigger than we need right now but to give us growth to meet that long-term goal," he said.
According to Brown, they had to turn away a million pounds of needed food last year because they didn’t have anywhere to store it. He said a quarter of what they provide is fresh produce, and the new facility will allow them to store it until it’s distributed.
Ozarks Food Harvest has received a challenge grant from the Mabee Foundation in Tulsa, but in order to get the $700,000 to put towards the expansion project, it must raise $900,000 by the end of the year.
Learn more about the project and how to help here.
