Dutchess Outreach, a Growing Community Resource
Dutchess County is no stranger to growing hunger problems in the United States, but for the last 45 years, Dutchess Outreach has been doing their part to help.
Dutchess Outreach helps provide assistance to locals in need to food throughout Dutchess County. In 2018 they boasted serving around 170,000 thousand meals served according to their 2018 Annual Report.
Services that Dutchess Outreach provides spans a wide range of categories. Primarily connecting food banks and meal programs to locals in need, Dutchess Outreach also connects eligible people with benefits such as SNAP and the WIC Program.
SNAP, previously known as Food Stamps, connects locals with “electronic benefits that can be used like cash to purchase food. SNAP helps low-income working people, senior citizens, the disabled and others feed their families,” according to Dutchess Outreach’s website.
They also provide benefits through the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program which as the name implies, provides, “nutrition education, breastfeeding support, referrals and a variety of nutritious foods to low-income pregnant, breastfeeding or postpartum women, infants and children up to age five to promote and support good health,” as the Dutchess Outreach website reports.
One aspect that Dutchess Outreach continues to strive to achieve is distributing local, Hudson Valley produce through their farmers’ markets and community organizations. According to the organizations 2018 Annual Report, Dutchess Outreach distributed over 40,000 pounds of fresh local produce through the Do Fresh Market and the Mobile Farmers’ Market on Wheels.
Dutchess Outreach Executive Director Brian Riddell, has been able to grow the community reach of Dutchess Outreach by instituting fresh food alternatives to the area in recent years. “Most recently we’ve really gotten to expand our fresh food offerings first through the farmers market. . . We’ve also now, in collaboration with the regional food bank, we’re doing a free monthly farm stand, where we gather up donations from the food banks and we give out fresh food,” Riddell said.
Over his 30 years at Dutchess Outreach and 25 years as Executive Director, RIddell has seen the organization progress from merely a food bank to multiple simultaneous outreach events, such as the Mobile Farmers’ Market on Wheels. “We’ve really expanded the core programs which are primarily the food, we started with the food pantry in 1974 and then in 1982 the lunchbox program began, which is free community meals, and then we’ve grown also now to do dinner at the lunchbox, and also providing food to after school programs,” Riddell said.
He doesn’t plan to stop at just what is currently being done by Dutchess Outreach however. Having expanded so drastically in the last four to five years. Riddell plans to focus on refining what they are doing right now and perfecting the initiatives that are already in the works. “Our growth will continue to focus on the fresh foods,” Riddell said. “You always have to be looking at the quality of what you’re doing.”
Reach into the community is always at the forefront of ability to grow for organizations similar to Dutchess Outreach, and RIddell is not ignorant to that fact. “There’s only a certain amount of money you can get out of a community, and there’s a lot of competition for that,” Riddell said.
Dutchess Outreach has positively affected thousands of Dutchess County residents through state programs and self-run food banks over the 45 years it has been active and plans to slow down are not present in the future.
