Ozarks Food Harvest does more than just feed the hungry. The Food Bank is Transforming Hunger into Hope TM for the more than 41,000 individuals it serves each month.

For 25 years, Ozarks Food Harvest has been distributing food, that might otherwise go to waste, to 323 hunger relief agencies in 29 counties across the Ozarks. In fact, Ozarks Food Harvest is the only food bank in soutwest Missouri. It is also a certified member of America's Second Harvest - The Nation's Food Bank Network.

In 2007, OFH distributed nearly five million pounds of food!

In addition to food distribution, Ozarks Food Harvest offers direct relief through its Kids Cafe®, Food for Thought™, Club F.U.N.™ and Mobile Food Pantry™ programs.

Kids Cafe® is Ozarks Food Harvest’s after-school feeding program that provides hot evening meals to Ozarks children who would otherwise go home to an empty dinner plate.

More than 50,000 children in the Ozarks live in poverty, and the food bank’s children’s programs such as Kids Cafe® focus on serving these kids. By partnering with several local nonprofits, Kids Cafe® sites serve nearly 1,000 children each night, five nights a week in 16 locations across southwest Missouri.

The food bank’s fastest growing program, Food for Thought™, provides severely at-risk children with a backpack filled with nutritious child-friendly foods for them to take home on the weekends, when they might otherwise go hungry.

The program is designed to allow students to get the assistance without drawing any attention to themselves by using backpacks, which look like any other student’s backpack.

During the 2006-2007 school year, nearly 7,800 backpacks were filled. Twenty-five schools now benefit from this innovative, life-saving program!

Club F.U.N.™ (Fitness, Understanding Health, and Nutrition) is designed to teach children ages 6-9 the importance of fitness and good nutrition, while “The Power of Choice” is geared toward children ages 10-13 to teach them the same concepts, along with discussions about why good nutrition is important to their changing bodies.

Club F.U.N.™ won the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “Summer Sunshine Award” for excellence in summer food service programs that emphasize improved nutrition and physical activities.

Rolling to the rescue, Ozarks Food Harvest’s new Mobile Food Pantry utilizes an adapted beverage trailer to bring food to people in impoverished communities.

In poor rural communities with high elderly populations and few opportunities for jobs, transportation for people to get to a pantry miles away is nonexistent. A major goal of the Mobile Food Pantry is to send out a larger variety of product to underserved areas with high poverty rates.

Thanks to the Rotary Clubs of Springfield and Ridewell Suspensions, for the purchase of the new truck and trailer, thousands of needy families and elderly in the Ozarks are getting the help they need.

The Mobile Food Pantry distributed more than 180,000 pounds of food to more than 5,500 people in its first year of operation.