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Longwood Foundation gives Food Bank of Delaware $1.5 million gift

Food Bank of Delaware
The Food Bank of Delaware is a step closer to paying for its new facility in Newark.

The Food Bank of Delaware is getting a financial boost from the Longwood Foundation.

 

 

The Longwood Foundation is giving the Food Bank $1.5 million dollars  to help pay for construction of its new facility in Newark.  

 

“It’s a brand new 80,000-square-foot facility that’s going to allow us to ensure that we have a greater opportunity to operate more efficiently, grow food on our own 3.5-acre farm, train more people, feed more people and plan longer into the future,” says Chad Robinson, workforce development director for the Food Bank.

 

Total cost of the construction project is $10 million. Robinson says so far the Food Back has raised close to $9 million, with $4.5 million used to purchase the facility.

 

Robinson says the new facility will help the organization better address hunger throughout the First State.

 

“We know that our mission at its core is ensuring that there is a community free of hunger. And unfortunately today, there are still Delawareans who are experiencing hunger in a very real way. So we want to do everything that we can to make sure that that problem lessons and hopefully goes away in the future. And this facility is a huge step in the right direction to make that happen,” said Robinson.

 
 

The design phase was completed last year.  Work on the farm began in November.

 

Robinson says the new facility should be completely finished and up and running by the end of this year.

 
 

Kelli Steele has over 30 years of experience covering news in Delaware, Baltimore, Winchester, Virginia, Phoenix, Arizona and San Diego, California.