I’ve heard so many times that this isn’t going to be a sprint, it’s going to be a marathon. I don’t know how much of the 26 miles we have run, but we are definitely feeling it.

Our list continues to grow. This week, we delivered over 3,500 bags of food to 1,768 households – about 35,000 pounds of food. As we head into next week, we are already planning expansion of the program by scheduling additional food pickups at the Greater Boston Food Bank. Next week, we’ll add second pickups on one or two days, for a total of six or seven during the week. With these additional pickups, we believe we can scale to around 2,300 households before we will require a second packing site.

Recognizing that this program is not sustainable over the long term, we have started thinking about “what’s next”? Over the next few weeks we will pull together others in the hunger-relief network, people from the city, managers of senior housing, and others to identify when and how we can lessen the strain on this particular program or shift to something more sustainable, recognizing that the need for food has and will continue to grow significantly.

We were happy to partner with Heading Home this week, having them redistribute some of our bags to their facilities in Dorchester, Hyde Park, Malden, and Quincy.  We also received a couple of comments on Facebook this week that lifted our spirits and reminded us why we are working so hard:

My bag this week was a fantastic help. I can’t thank all of you enough for the work you’re doing for us!

I’m so grateful for this food support as I am disabled due to a chronic illness. Thank you to everyone who helps!! It’s given me some peace of mind ☮️

And when we saw that our pool of 283 volunteers came from over 20 towns and cities as far out as Andover, Lowell, Beverly and Southborough, we were reminded that we are not doing this alone and there are so many people out there wanting and willing to help.

And our regular work continues! This past week, we distributed over 16,000 pounds of food to Somerville. Next week we start deliveries to Mission Main, a housing complex in Roxbury. We are also focused on how to better support Chelsea. We’ve recently added the Chelsea Collaborative to our list of organizations receiving food rescue and this coming week, we will increase our food rescue deliveries to the Chelsea Salvation Army. We will also start delivering food to that group directly from the Greater Boston Food Bank. Our trucks are on the road every day of the week picking up at the food bank, supermarkets and Amazon Fresh and delivering that food throughout Greater Boston.

I say it every week, but your support in this effort has lifted our spirits, provided much needed resources, and lets us know we’re not alone. So thank you.