On March 17, Michele Pilla and Wholesome Riches site lead Trudy Skinner had the chance to take part in a special meeting at the Thomas Dudley Family School with the new Food Bank of South Jersey President and CEO Jane Asselta.
Jane and her team requested the meeting as part of listening and relationship building tour with key Food Bank partners. As she steps into the role former held by longtime Food Bank leader Fred Wasiak, Jane explained that every good relationship starts with listening to the concerns of others.
Dudley School principal Evelyn Ruiz also helped lead the discussion about Wholesome Riches operations, partnership with Camden Schools and how the Food Bank could further serve families in Camden.
With over 20 years of experience, Jane previously served as the New Jersey State Director for USDA Rural Development and is working to address food insecurity in her native area of South Jersey.
After learning about Michele’s leadership to start Wholesome Riches, she asked Michele and Trudy about our Love Your Neighbor food distribution operations and client satisfaction. She also asked principal Ruiz about past and present student nutrition programs to learn what is working best for the schools and what more can be done.
Among the suggestions for Jane was offering more hands-on experiences for students like cooking demonstrations and more variety of fresh fruit and vegetables at Wholesome Riches’ food distributions.
We also discussed the how the schools and Wholesome Riches are implementing a charitable food delivery pilot program with DoorDash that is locally supervised by the Food Bank. The program, which Wholesome Riches began using this year, uses funding provided by DoorDash to provide free grocery deliveries from our distributions to families in need by DoorDash drivers. Wholesome Riches is one of the first local organizations to implement the DoorDash delivery program and is providing key feed back to the Food Bank.
It was a productive meeting and one that we hope strengthens our partnership with the Food Bank and Camden Schools for years to come.
You can watch highlights of the conversation.