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The San Antonio Food Bank began supporting flood recovery efforts in the Hill Country immediately after the deadly floods swept through the Guadalupe River.
“That's all a part of our day-in, day-out territory,” San Antonio Food Bank’s Chief Philanthropy Officer Michael Guerra said. “We generally do mobile distributions there, you know, [we have] volunteers that work [there]. So it's people we know, it's churches, it's nonprofit agencies that we partner with regularly. So beginning on July 4, as the waters rose, the phone started to ring.”
The food bank is using three pantries it has in Hill Country counties as centers to distribute food and other needed donations to communities impacted by the floods. It held a mobile distribution in Kerrville on Friday the 11th and will hold another on Saturday.
This week, the San Antonio Food Bank sent trucks up to Kerr County filled with water, food, cleaning supplies, hygiene kits, and other needed items from members of the community, and it will send more trucks to San Angelo over the weekend.
Guerra said his organization’s primary goal is to deliver those needed supplies, but that it also has a secondary role — getting some donations out of the disaster area.
“A lot of people descend on a community at the time of a disaster,” he said. “I mean, lots and lots and lots, and we've seen it happen. And what can happen is that you have the second disaster, and that's the wrong items being given in the wrong amounts in the wrong time.”
He described some of the kinds of things people should no longer be donating for the ongoing flood recovery: “It's things like water, things like clothes, anything that's a little bit bulky or that can't be immediately deployed,” Guerra said. “We've kind of taken that back, and we have extra cleaning supplies, right, shovels and all those kinds of things.”
He said they may be needed again at some point in the future, but that there is a finite amount of space to store all of the donations that come in to support a community in the aftermath of a crisis, and it needs to be used for the most essential resources.
He described the donations that the San Antonio Food Bank is looking to collect to support the Hill Country region in the coming weeks and months.
“We're in the midst of a bit of a pivot, and a pivot toward mid- and long-term recovery,” Guerra said. “And what that means for us generally is that when it comes to in-kind donations, we're going to ask for what is normally our 12 most wanted items, right? So it's from diapers to pet food to all the shelf stable food items you would think of like rice and beans and veggies, canned fruits, pastas.”
Guerra said the community can also help the food bank’s work by donating money or time.
“I really encourage people, if you want to get involved in maybe one of our mobile distributions in Kerrville or in San Angelo in the future, in addition to just our regular work that we're doing in San Antonio preparing all of those food boxes and other supplies that are going to go out to those communities,” he said. “We definitely need the volunteers. It's the life, really, of our organization and of our response.”
