Individuals and families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic across the Kenai Peninsula will continue to benefit from food being distributed through the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank.
Greg Meyer, the Executive Director at the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank states that the cities of Kenai and Soldotna have used CARES Act funds to continue the food box distribution program through April, “When we started this program last September, it went through the 30th of December with, at that time, what was the end date for the use of the CARES Act money. We stopped it on the 30th of December and as we told people that this would be the last week, we had a lot of feedback that people were still weren’t in a good place with food and that not doing the bags would really be a hardship. We had communicated that back and forth with the city and the City of Soldotna and Kenai both have just been awesome in checking in and making sure that things are going well. So we talked about the needs and that it hasn’t gone away. We continue doing the bags and they took that back and reassessed what they had left in funds to prioritize that and determine that one of the priorities was to keep doing these supplemental food bags through April.”
There will be three distributions across the region. They include:
- Monday at the Kenai United Methodist Church from 12:30 to 3:00 p.m.
- Wednesdays at the Soldotna United Methodist Church from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
- Thursdays at Christ Lutheran starting at 5:00 p.m.
Meyer says demand is still at an all time high, “People are still rebounding, we haven’t seen a lot of economic turnaround here, yet. I think as summer gets going and things can get back to work again, but we’re actually seeing an increase in folks coming to get support.”
There will be a new distribution point added to the Monday and Wednesday distribution with the Thursday evening location at Christ Lutheran. Meyer asks that people use one place per week, “All we’re asking is that folks pick one site a week to get their food from so that we can stretch it out to everybody to not have people go to more than one site a week and if it is possible for people to get their food during the day to do that so that the folks that can come after 5 when they get them with work could utilize that distribution point at Christ Lutheran on Thursday night.”