Reducing food waste by sharing reclaimed food with people in need in our local community.
FCC began in 2020.The original plan was to open a client-choice food market, where shoppers choose the foods they want and will eat. Then COVID happened. Everyone went to the drive-up model and that is how we started. From November 2020 to May 2021, we operated a drive-up food giveaway at Del Mar Park in Aurora every Thursday afternoon, serving 144 households a day.
We opened our free food market in July 2021 on Airport Blvd, operating every Thursday from 10 am-6 pm. A rent increase made it impossible to stay at that location, and we had to close in April 2022. After a search of almost a year, we found a new location with CrossWind Hope and Restoration Center, a nondenominational church in Aurora. We reopened April 2023.
Unlike other food pantries, whose main mission is feeding the food-insecure, Food Connect Colorado has a dual mission. We not only seek to feed the food-insecure, we want to do it with food that would otherwise be wasted. There is plenty of free food available; it just needs to be picked up and transported to the people who need it. We pick up food from Food Bank of the Rockies, Volunteers of America's City Harvest, Target, King Soopers, and the Denver Rescue Mission.
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