NONPROFIT Tarrant Area Food Bank CEO Julie Butner talks about the area nonpro t Julie Butner joined the Tarrant Area Food Bank in January 2020. As a Texas Christian University student, she discovered the food bank when volunteering as part of a dietetic internship. The Tarrant Area Food Bank was founded in 1982 and now serves 13 counties, including Bosque, Cooke, Denton, Erath, Hamilton, Hill, Hood, Johnson, Palo Pinto, Parker, Somervell, Tarrant and Wise. Butner sat down with Community Impact and discussed hardships the food bank faced in 2020 and its plans for the future. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
BY HANNAH JOHNSON
Julie Butner is the CEO of Tarrant Area Food Bank. (Photos by Hannah Johnson/Community Impact)
Volunteers helped organize donations at the Tarrant Area Food Bank’s distribution center.
HELPING HANDS The Tarrant Area Food Bank operates through volunteers. In 2021, about 3,000 volunteers helped the food bank’s operations with a combined 19,400 of volunteer hours.
COULD YOU DESCRIBE THE TARRANT AREA FOOD BANK? The Tarrant Area Food Bank is the largest nonpro t non-health care entity in Tarrant County. We serve 13 counties as a distribution center. We have over 500 partner agencies that act as local food pantries. [Those entities] actually provide food directly to clients inside neighborhoods where the neighbors live so that it’s conve- niently accessed for them. We’re the third-largest food bank in the state of Texas and in the top 20%, in terms of size, in the country. That’s primarily driven by population, so we have 2.9 million residents in our 13-county area, and about half a million of those residents go to bed at night hungry. COVID 19 AFFECTED PEOPLE’S NEED FOR FOOD. HOW DID THAT AFFECT THE TARRANT COUNTY AREA? It was hugely impactful because our partner agencies—that’s over 500 partners that we rely on to distribute food—in essence shut down over- night. There’s also a school breakfast program and an after-school program [for school-age children], and those programs closed because schools closed. Suddenly, families who were
previously reliant on those govern- ment programs at school no longer had access to those meals. The food bank, which was reliant on all those partner agencies to help us get food into the community, lost a lot of part- ners, and so we really had to pivot. That’s when you saw those really long lines, people waiting in their cars and driving up and opening up the trunk of their car and us putting food in. We’d never provided food to clients [and] neighbors directly before—we always relied on our partner networks. ARE YOU STILL SEEING THE EFFECTS OF COVID 19 IN THE COMMUNITY AND THE RATE OF NEEDS? The COVID e ects have dimin- ished signi cantly. We’re now faced with what’s happening with in a- tion, and food cost is up 13% over last year. Of course we struggled for a while now in this community with housing. We have a housing shortage, and so when you have a shortage, prices go up. We also have an issue with child care; we don’t have enough child care agencies [in our area]. Child Care Associates [a Tarrant County-based nonpro t] just received $35 million from the
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60 million nutritious meals provided in a year
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putting nutritious food on tables instead of just any kind of food. We know that food has a direct impact on chronic diseases. We know we have a role that we can play in reducing health care costs for our community by providing nutritious food. HOW CAN THE COMMUNITY HELP? The best thing the community can do to support us is to volunteer and to learn about our services so that they can help communicate and advocate on behalf of neighbors who are in need of food. Tarrant Area Food Bank 2600 Cullen St., Fort Worth 817-857-7100 https://ta .org Hours: Mon.-Thurs. 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Fri 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.
1 million weekly meals 3,000 pounds
of fresh produce harvested from the food bank’s gardens
county to build more facilities because we don’t have enough child care services here. WHAT DO YOU SEE FOR THE FUTURE OF THE TARRANT AREA FOOD BANK? We’re investing in a produce pack- ing facility across the street to provide access to more nutritious food. When food banking rst started, it was whatever food you could get [was] what you were trying to put back into the community. We were at the mercy of what is donated to us, but we’re trying to be more conscientious about
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