The San Antonio Food Bank is planning a major improvement to its far Westside headquarters, a project focused on making the volunteer experience easier and better.
Set to start in early 2025, the renovation of the nonprofit’s primary facility at 5200 Historic Old Hwy. 90 is directed toward serving the 2,000 volunteers who show up weekly to sort food and do other critical tasks.
That work makes it possible to efficiently feed and provide other social services every week to nearly 110,000 people in a 29-county region.
Within the scope of the estimated $3.5 million project is a remodeled volunteer lobby, a new volunteer welcome and orientation center and a new volunteer engagement space inside the warehouse. Sign-in kiosks will be better spaced in the reception area to make registration smoother.
The San Antonio-based firm Elevate Architecture is the lead design team.
The nonprofit plans to raise funds for the 19,000-square-foot renovation starting next year and complete the project in late 2025.
The goal is to improve how the Food Bank’s volunteer experience works and increase the number of people who can lend a hand.
“Space limits the number of shifts and the ability and the size of the group,” that can be accommodated,” said Eric Cooper, president and CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank. “A lot of the product that we’re sourcing and getting donated is bulk, and that bulk product has to be repackaged, and so we’re needing more volunteers to be able to do that production work.”
The target is 3,000 volunteers a week, he said, but the renovation will make space for about 5,000 to meet future capacity.
At the Food Bank, volunteer shifts are assigned to fit the specific needs of a group according to their age, numbers, interests and abilities. The new orientation space will make it easier to provide quick training and get the volunteers working on their task, Cooper said.
That’s important because the need has not abated since the pandemic led to extreme needs in the community and long car lines of people seeking help at food distribution points.
“We’re seeing pandemic-level demand as a result of inflation,” Cooper said. “Any gain in income was outpaced by expenses in housing and utilities and the cost of food.”
The causes are numerous, he said, but especially the general economic uncertainty driven by war and politics, and trade decisions made by the previous administration. Giving is also negatively affected and donations are down, Cooper said.
But, “our city comes through for us, we hope, and so we’re just working as hard as we can to try to meet that need,” he said.
The Food Bank looks at its mission as serving the entire community, Cooper added, and providing an outlet for volunteering is a way to help fight not just physical hunger.
“This magical power of volunteerism, of service — when we feel overwhelmed and discouraged and that the world is just kicking our butts, the quickest and easiest way to lighten our load, sometimes, is just to take the load off someone else,” he said. “It puts your struggle in perspective.”
The Food Bank will open a new 300-space parking garage in November. The headquarters was completed in 2008 and since then has been expanded or remodeled three times.
