The Riverbend Food Bank wants to put an end to hunger in all of western Illinois and eastern Iowa. Located in a 60,000 square foot facility in Davenport, Riverbend has an ambitious goal to triple it’s size. Take a county similar in size to Knox – with a population of 54,000 – that means over 7,400 people go hungry.
Mike Miller is President and CEO of Riverbend who says over 1.3 million meals get missed in Knox County a year. When you add in the other counties the food bank serves – 23 counties total – that makes 124,000 people are missing 22.3 million meals per year. That’s why Riverbend’s ambitious goal is to triple in size by 2025: to meet that need.
“People think of hunger as a third world problem.” explains Miller. “Like Africa, world hunger is a problem but they don’t realize that literally one out of eight people in our communities don’t have food. It’s even worse with kids actually with a rate of one out of five. They are what we call food insecure, which means an insufficient access to enough food to live a healthy and active lifestyle, which interferes with normal functioning that you and I would experience.”
Riverbend set their goal to expand in 2014 when 7.3 million meals were served. By 2017, 12.9 million were served. To better serve the southern portion of their region – part of the broad plan is a possibility to opening a location in Knox County. The idea is merely on a conceptual level – but according to Miller, Knox County is just as important to serve as someone “just down the street.”
