The Camp Verde Town Council made a $10,000 grant of community outreach funds to Manzanita Outreach during its Wednesday, Feb. 7 meeting. Community outreach funds are reserved for programs the council selects.
Manzanita Outreach provides healthy food to residents across the Verde Valley, including 330 households and around 1,000 residents in Camp Verde each month, using both home delivery and a pickup service. They have also been partnering with DoorDash to provide home delivery to Camp Verde residents.
Manzanita Outreach had previously received funding from the town through a grant from the town’s Economic Development Department, allowing them to extend their service area to Verde Lakes.
Executive director Ben Burke said their annual funding need to continue food assistance in Camp Verde is over $30,000 as demand increases and that the community outreach funding would allow them to serve Camp Verde residents with food from March through June.
The organization has been seeing a monthly rate of growth between 4% and 8%. Burke estimated that participation will increase by about 5% each month from March to June. By June, they expect to be serving around 1,250 Camp Verde residents, or about 9% of the town’s population.
“As a reminder, the food that we distribute is not simply donated food,” Burke said. “We have endeavored to secure state and federal funding for our region to purchase fresh produce from our local farmers, including several farmers that participate in the Verde Valley Farmers’ Market. We also have a ‘no junk food’ policy for donated foods in our food bags. You will not find chips, candy, soda, sugary beverages, overly processed or overly salted foods or an overload of day-old stale white bread.”
Burke added that these items are commonly associated with traditional food pantries, but Manzanita strives to provide healthy options.
“We believe that the function of food assistance is to do just that, to assist, and we believe that there is more than enough fresh and healthy food for everybody,” Burke said. “When it comes to food assistance, we believe that food is really not the problem, but rather administrative distribution and marketing functions. That’s why we focus on building our administrative capacity, creating efficient distribution solutions and doing so with dignity and respect without any judgment.”
