Farmville Area Community Emergency Services (FACES), a member of the Feed More Agency Network, recently moved to a new location in Farmville, Va. to better distribute food to an average of over 1,000 residents per week in the area.
“The new facility will greatly increase our capacity to meet the need for healthy food in the region,” said Ellery Sedgwick, President of FACES. “It will more than double storage and refrigeration space enabling us to distribute significantly more fresh produce and frozen protein. The additional space will also make it easier to efficiently carry out current programs and to develop new programs in partnership with other local institutions. After six moves since FACES’ founding, it’s giving us an institutional stability and permanence we’ve never had.”
The space includes a new welcome area for clients and community room with space for cooking demonstrations that will help to expand and enrich their services in the community. Increased refrigeration and freezer space allows more storage for United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) distributions for programs including the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). The additional space will also allow for storage of more food and supplies for Feed More’s weekend BackPack program.
“We are thrilled to have FACES, one of our strongest agencies in the region, re-locate to this new facility,” said Doug Pick, President and CEO of Feed More. “This process has been a labor of love for everyone involved, and their leadership has helped lift up other agencies in the community in providing more critical support to the people who need it most.”
Funding for this project was generously provided by a number of Farmville and Richmond area supporters including a generous matching gift from The Robert G. Cabell III and Maude Morgan Cabell Foundation.
FACES will be hosting a distribution on Saturday, December 14 from 8-10:30am. Afterwards, they invite the public to an inaugural reception with snacks to follow at 11am. For more information about FACES please visit their website at FacesFoodPantry.com.
About FACES
As a member of Feed More’s Agency Network, FACES distributes emergency and supplementary food weekly to low-income residents of Prince Edward and neighboring counties. Founded in the early 1980s, FACES currently distributes around a million pounds of food annually with an estimated retail value over $1,500,000, still with an all-volunteer workforce.
