Fentress Food Bank Needs Donations To Purchase New Freezer

The Fentress County Food Bank is asking for public donations for a new walk-in freezer for perishable food.

The current Food Bank freezer is a converted refrigerator that is showing signs of wearing out and needs to be replaced. Fentress County Food Bank Treasurer Kathy Bilbrey said the bank takes no profit from donations and therefore has no excess funds.

“We have a need,” Bilbrey said. “We tend to get donations of meat more so now than we did in the past and we have no way to preserve them and keep them as well as we get orders sometimes from the USDA and a lot of those things are frozen.” (:18)

Bilbrey said said that the food bank serves at least 600 families a month, each family much of the time consisting of 2-6 members. Bilbrey said that the food bank averages out to serve seven to eight thousand individuals a year. Fentress County Food Bank is supported by donations that are put entirely into the bank.

She said volunteers support the organization.

“It’s a lot of seniors as well as others,” Bilbrey said. “Matter of fact I think that the seniors that we’ve served were something like 2,500 of them of maybe 7,500 total and maybe 13 to 14 hundred of them were children.”

Bilbrey said that anyone who qualifies for food stamps is able to come to the food bank for assistance and be met by volunteers.

“Any given day probably at least 12 to 15 and most of them are retired folks,” Bilbrey said. “They generally do it from the goodness of their hearts and they don’t just work the one day that food is given out they also work during the week to gather the food up.”

Bilbrey said that the current freezer was salvaged from Second Harvest and was converted into a freezer by food bank volunteers. \