FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Roadrunner Food Bank

CONTACT: Sonya Warwick

Direct: 505-349-8682

Cell: 505-269-4775

NEW MOBILE FOOD PANTRY PROGRAM

VISITS HAGERMAN & LAKE ARTHUR

Hagerman/Lake Arthur, NM - July 18, 2008 – The Mobile Food Pantry, a program of Roadrunner Food Bank will make its first visit to Chaves County to provide food to those in need of food assistance.  The Mobile Food Pantry will have two stops during the inaugural visit to Hagerman and Lake Arthur area on Tuesday, July 22.

The first stop will be at the Boys and Girls Club at 501 East Argyle in Hagerman.  Volunteers will begin distributing food at 11:30 am.  The second visit will occur at the Lake Arthur School at 700 Broadway in Lake Arthur with distribution beginning at 1:30 pm.  Each location will receive 2,500 pounds of food that will provide supplemental food to approximately 50 families at each location.  The organization sponsoring the Mobile Food Pantry visit is REACH 2000 .

The Mobile Food Pantry is a new program of Roadrunner Food Bank and started this past June. It delivers to areas where individuals may not have access to food support programs or where food pantries or feeding programs do not exist.  Roadrunner Food Bank partners with local community organizations throughout New Mexico who sponsor the initiative to areas that are underserved.

Melody Wattenbarger, Executive Director at Roadrunner Food Bank said, “The Mobile Food Pantry is important for our large rural state and essential to the growing numbers of working poor.  Communities and areas that do not have access to food programs such as food pantries and soup kitchens now can rely on the Mobile Food Pantry to bring fresh produce and staple foods directly to people who are hungry and have nowhere else to turn for food.”

The Mobile Food Pantry is available to communities in nine New Mexico counties including Bernalillo, Catron, Chaves, Eddy, Lincoln, Sandoval, Socorro, Torrance and Valencia. Groups, businesses and individuals are invited to sponsor one or more Mobile Food Pantry sites.  Wattenbarger continued, “Scheduling the Mobile Pantry is easy.  A sponsoring organization simply has to find a location with good parking in their community, let the community know it is arriving, and find volunteers to help distribute the food.  Roadrunner Food Bank takes care of getting it to the community in need.”

Roadrunner Food Bank serves more than 240,000 hungry New Mexicans every year.  National statistics indicate that one in six New Mexicans is hungry and does not know where their next meal is coming from.  Wattenbarger said, “Through the Mobile Food Pantry, we are able to extend our services to reach people in communities that we may have never served.  100,000 people in New Mexico continue to go hungry every year and this program will help us reach those we haven’t been able to reach before.”

For more information or to schedule a Mobile Pantry visit, please contact Roadrunner Food Bank at 505.247.2052 or visit our website at www.rrfb.org.

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Roadrunner Food Bank of New Mexico is New Mexico’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to ending hunger.  Through its statewide network of 600 partner agencies and six regional food banks, Roadrunner Food Bank distributes more than 16 million pounds of food annually to approximately 240,000 New Mexicans in need.  Every dollar donated yields $12 worth of food.  Roadrunner Food Bank is the only New Mexico member of America’s Second Harvest—the Nation’s Food Bank Network.  In the 28 years since it was founded, Roadrunner Food Bank has distributed more than 165 million pounds of food statewide.  For more information about Roadrunner Food Bank and its programs visit www.rrfb.org