American Heart Association’s Capacity Building Program for faith-based food pantries helps support access to better nutrition
Do you run a faith-based food pantry in Maryland?
Heart is helping expand pantry capacity with refrigerators, freezers, and shelving.
Building Capacity to Support Access
The American Heart Association is working closely with faith-based food pantries across the Baltimore and Greater Maryland region to ensure families have access to nutritious food. Our neighbors who rely on food pantries appreciate having healthy options. That’s where our collaboration with faith-based food assistance programs makes a difference.
Many of these faith-based pantries lack the equipment needed to properly store and distribute fresh produce.
Through our Capacity Building Program, we are working to boost the capacity of faith-based food assistance facilities to store and distribute fresh fruits and vegetables. This includes providing essential equipment such as refrigerators, freezers, and shelving, enabling these sites to increase both the quantity and quality of healthy food available to the community.
Why it Matters
- In Maryland, between 2020-2022, approximately 9.5% of households were food insecure, and 1 in 8 people faced hunger.
- Nearly 680,000 Marylanders participate in SNAP, and about 40% of food-insecure individuals earn too much to qualify for federal or state assistance.
- Without intervention, these disparities can lead to shorter life expectancies and chronic health conditions.
Our Commitment
The American Heart Association is committed to addressing nutrition security alongside our community heroes so that everyone can eat healthy — no matter where they live or their circumstances.
If you run a faith-based food assistance program and could benefit from additional equipment to increase your capacity to store and distribute healthy food, please click the button below and fill out the form to see how the American Heart Association can help.
Refrigeration allows St. Matthew’s New Life United Methodist Church to feed more people in Baltimore
The community surrounding St. Matthew’s New Life United Methodist Church is a food desert in east Baltimore. The need became even more obvious coming out of the pandemic. Our church partnered with a nonprofit farm in Baltimore County to provide fresh, nutritious produce at our annual wellness festivals — potatoes, greens, carrots, onions and other vegetables — allowing us to serve about 180 households once a year.
But the results of a survey at the 2024 wellness festival were clear: Can you do this more often?
In October 2024, working with additional partners, we began monthly distribution of fresh produce. Denise Washington, a restaurateur and parishioner of the church, would use leftover produce to make soups and other hot meals, which could be packaged and frozen for distribution. For the first few months, we would distribute 20 to 50 meals a week.
Enter the American Heart Association, which in December helped us acquire a double-door commercial freezer, allowing St. Matthew’s to exponentially increase our output of the frozen meals. This February, we are able to store and distribute 200 heart-healthy meals for our community.
Being able to distribute meals rather than a straight box of produce has also helped us reach more people. They may not want or know what to do with a bag of potatoes, but they love Denise’s potato soup! Refrigeration also allows us to distribute food throughout the month, particularly during the last few weeks and days, when people may have already exhausted their resources.
Refrigeration has also allowed us to purchase and store food items like turkeys when they are less expensive.
In an effort to continue fostering a culture of health in our congregation and community, I signed on to implement the Healthy Food and Beverage Toolkit. Now we are being more intentional in our offerings not just with food distribution, but when providing refreshments during community meetings in our building, such as offering water or iced tea rather than sugar-sweetened beverages, and providing snacks like fresh fruit salad or pineapple.
We are proud to be working with the American Heart Association to help address nutrition security in Baltimore.
