Community Involvement

Agency partners and client demographics

• Food Lifeline provides food to more than 300 food banks, shelters and meal programs.
• Food Lifeline member food banks serve people in rural, suburban, and urban areas across every county in Western Washington.
• Our partners include 101 meal programs, which provide breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner to people in need of food for financial, health, or other reasons. 
• 30% of people we feed are children, 23% are seniors. Seniors are the fastest-growing group of people who we feed.
• We help to feed hundreds of thousands of people every year through our agency partners and our programs.

Food security in Western Washington:

• 1 in 8 (13%) people struggle with hunger in Western Washington.
• 696,910 people are food insecure in Western Washington, according to Feeding America research.
• 1 in 5 (18%) children struggle with hunger in Western Washington.

# Meals provided per dollar donated

• For every dollar donated to Food Lifeline, you help us provide the equivalent of four meals
• Thanks to the combined impact of donated food and funds, 96% of Food Lifeline’s expenses directly support programs that feed people.

Total pounds and meals distributed

• We distributed 51 million pounds of food in 2018, which is enough food to create the equivalent of 42 million meals annually.
• We provide enough food to create the equivalent of 116,000 meals per day to food assistance programs across Western Washington.

FORTERRA

Forterra is dedicated to land conservation, protecting wildlands to urban spaces throughout the Pacific Northwest. Since 1989, the group has secured more than 275,000 acres in over 450 separate land transactions. Their work serves in a variety of ways:

• Conserve farmland
• Protect a broad range of ecosystems
• Create jobs
• Revitalize small towns
• Reduce wildfires
• Cut greenhouse emissions
• Expand access to fresh, locally grown food
• Lower construction costs
• Develop sustainable urban areas

Blue Fern Homes’ support is helping Forterra secure 4 key pieces of land this year:

• Little Skookum Inlet, 816 acres of river habitat, wetland, and forest, plus 2 miles of marine shoreline;
  
• Maloney Creek and Forest, more than 50 acres of forest that is home to such endangered species as the marbled murrelet and northern spotted owl;
• Windy Ridge, 350 acres that have never been logged, with 300-year-old silver fir, Douglas fir, and hemlock towering over the forest; and
• Van Wyk Ranch, spanning almost 4,500 acres of rolling hills, flatlands, steep slopes, and shrub-steppe, which is threatened by climate and wildfires that put both the land and the wildlife at risk.