The Dutchess Outreach Board of Directors is proud to appoint Dr. 
Renee Fillette as the Executive Director of the organization. Renee will take the role as our Executive Director of 31 years, Brian Riddell, begins his next adventure in retirement. The Board thanks Brian Riddell for the years of service and work.
Renee Fillette is an executive bringing over 16 years of experience in child welfare, domestic violence, peer support, autism, behavioral health, homelessness, food insecurity, care management, substance abuse, Head Start, and education. At an early age, Renee found her passion while volunteering in soup kitchens, food pantries, and shelters for the homeless. In 2003, she founded the first new foster care agency to be licensed in New York state in over 30 years. It was there at St. John Bosco that she learned about leadership and management of a non-profit and grew the agency from its original budget of $300k to nearly $2m serving high-risk children in community-based group homes. Several years later she served as the executive director at Grace Smith House, a Dutchess County-based agency for survivors of domestic violence. It was under her tenure that the agency expanded its services to offer a teen dating violence prevention program in all 13 school districts throughout the county. In 2014 Renee earned her doctorate in Public Service: Leadership and Management of Non-Profits and moved into a newly created position of Chief Operating Officer at Astor Services for Children and Families. During her time at Astor Renee led the restructuring of a $65m agency, major service expansions in the Bronx, and performance improvements to enhance the quality of care provided and the fiscal health of the agency.
Renee’s career has always focused on providing much-needed services to people in the most respectful, effective, and efficient way possible. Her work and travels have informed her about the devastating impacts of poverty, housing, and food insecurity, and the many systemic challenges that prevent people from achieving their greatest potential for health and happiness. It is her mission to connect with people, institutions, and social systems in a meaningful, compassionate, and transformative way. She feels deeply aligned with our mission at Dutchess Outreach and is looking forward to building on our strong legacy while supporting our staff to further their unique talents and honor their remarkable dedication.
Welcome to our brand new website! Thank you to Katy Dwyer Design for making our web presence dreams a reality. With our new look we hope to more effectively extend our reach and services while stimulating a stronger connection to our clients, our volunteers, and our supporters.
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By Sarah A. Salem, Director of Development, Dutchess Outreach
What makes a community a more desirable place to live, work, and play? Communities are complex structures. Diverse systems of people, organizations, ideas, and behaviors that are always moving, breathing, pulsing, and hopefully, evolving to better suit the needs of those who reside within them. In order to thrive communities need fuel; a well-functioning economy, good jobs, upstanding community leaders and politicians, strong systems of public transportation, infrastructure, education, human services, space to play, and, most of all, consistent access to quality food. A well-fed quality life.
Food for Health
Over 20 years of research has shown that access to affordable, healthy food is a significant challenge among low-income communities, like the City of Poughkeepsie, and that this lack of access is directly associated with increased rates of obesity and other diet-related diseases. In fact, 80% of the factors that negatively influence a person’s health are due to socioeconomic, environmental, or behavioral factors such as poor nutrition. The most recent data from the USDA’s Food Atlas showed that within every single City of Poughkeepsie ward, at least 500 people, or 33% of the population, lived more than 1 mile from a supermarket or fresh food provider. According to data from the 2000-2010 Center for Disease Control Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, the prevalence of obesity among City of Poughkeepsie residents has shown a steady increase over the last 10 years, with an average of 32% of residents considered obese. For this reason, the existence of more equitable models of healthy food providers is a critical component of a healthy, thriving community.
Dutchess Outreach exists to widen food access, increase advocacy, and provide emergency relief by offering a range of vital services for the residents of Dutchess County while working to uncover a deeper understanding of the social ills our community faces in order to create innovative, community-minded solutions to achieve a healthier, more vibrant, sustainable community. For over 40 years Dutchess Outreach has helped thousands of women, men, and children throughout Dutchess County. Through our food pantry we provide food to families whose shelves are empty, our clothing closet provides lightly used clothes for children, our emergency relief programming ensures our clients can afford their medicine when they’re sick and that their lights and heat remain on, our community meal program, The Lunch Box, serves free hot lunch and dinner meals to anyone who needs and provides a safe space for the community to gather, and our newest program, the Poughkeepsie Plenty Fresh Market, provides our community access to affordable, fresh, locally farmed foods. This year we will be expanding our farming production in our new farm located right in the center of the City of Poughkeepsie.
The programming we offer our community is diverse in that we cover a range of vital services, however, they are all connected and equally assist us in achieving our larger mission to widen access to more nutritious foods, lower the instance of food insecurity, and increase the overall health and vitality of our community by creating a path towards a more resilient local, sustainable, and equitable food system. We envision offering a community cure through the distribution of fresh, nutritionally dense foods and education on the importance of eating locally farmed foods for our bodies and our environment. Most of all, we hope to strengthen social connections among organizations and members of the City of Poughkeepsie Community.
A Vehicle of Health
This season of the Poughkeepsie Plenty Fresh Market we are offering stakeholders and anchors an opportunity to invest in the health of their community through the purchase and sponsorship of our Poughkeepsie Plenty “Fresh Market Bucks”. Once funded, these vouchers will be distributed as part of a “Fresh Market Rx”, a community cure, by local healthcare practitioners as well as through other community health driven organizations to patients and residents who demonstrate signs or expressions of food insecurity in order to incentivize the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables at our mobile market and to incorporate healthier foods into their diets. “Fresh Market Bucks” come in denominations of $5, packs of $100 and will be distributed with “Fresh Market Rx” pads, which will offer healthcare practitioners an opportunity to discuss the importance of incorporating healthier foods into their diets and give them information on when and where they can purchase these foods at the Poughkeepsie Plenty Fresh Market.
At our market, each item of produce will feature a sign indicating nutrient density, vitamins, and minerals contained, and ways in which to prepare the food in order to get the most nutritional value from it. These facts will also appear as postcards so shoppers can conveniently take them home with them for reference.
Healthier Choices, Healthier Outcomes
Your net worth should not determine your ability to purchase real foods. Where you can afford to live should not present a barrier to access or limit you to processed, sugar-laden ‘foods’ full of calories, void of any worth. To improve the quality of life and overall health and resiliency of The City of Poughkeepsie and it’s residents, the ability to make that choice must be present. To ensure that everyone, regardless of income, has access to fresh, healthy food, and the support they need, as our mission extends.
By Brian Riddell, Executive Director, Dutchess Outreach
Since the Great Recession the stock market is hovering at all time highs. The number of people “officially” out of work has been cut in half. Oil is affordable again and gasoline costs two-plus bucks per gallon. Relatively happy days are here again.
And while food has become a source of recreation, hunger seems to have become a matter of fact.
The appeals in the mail are no longer only for children suffering in foreign countries but for those in our own backyard. Food pantries have come out of the closet. The problem of hunger is being highlighted almost (see below) everywhere. In our nation’s schools, teachers and volunteers are filling backpacks with food for students to take home on weekends. They recognize there’s a need that must be met if their students are to flourish. Food pantries are now even a part of many of this country’s military bases. The Olympic Village set up their own soup kitchen for hungry people in the host city. You never saw that before.
So many people don’t have enough food for themselves or their families. They can’t always afford it. It’s that simple.
But not a word was heard of hunger in America during the general presidential campaign. Nor since. No politician likes to use the word “poverty” either. Who knows what the November 8 results may bring, but cutting food assistance programs has always been a part of their agenda. The House Speaker’s most recent budget proposal called for eliminating food assistance for people in school or in job- training classes, for example.
However, we the people understand our fellow habitants must eat and are willing to support programs that work to ensure that poor people can nourish themselves. Around the time when housing costs were a third of a household’s budget we approved spending for efforts to supplement a person’s or family’s food budget. Food stamps, now properly titled the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), did just that.
But now, with the cost of housing, heating and other basic necessities what SNAP supplements is meager at best and at worst, zero. Poor people are either only eating the SNAP supplement or living on a food budget that can be easily depleted with unexpected costs.
So with that hunger here comes in many forms. At Dutchess Outreach, with the help of so many generous people, we have mounted an attack on a few fronts, to combat local hunger. Our Lunch Box program provides needed regular sustenance for between 200 and 400 people each month who either have no means or so little as to make a difference. The Beverly Closs Food Pantry is there for seven or eight hundred people a month who live on that margin between enough food and an emergency. Our after-school meal programs nourish the growing minds of elementary school age children; the unseen victims of hunger and poverty. And our latest effort, the Poughkeepsie Plenty Food Market (PPFM) is increasing the quality of healthy, fresh food available to our most vulnerable; senior citizens and women, infants and toddlers nutritionally at-risk.
We may not be able to end hunger, but with an array of efforts like these , and so many other ingenious initiatives across the County, we can impact the local problem. The idea is to think how you, we or I can reach out to ensure those within that reach get enough to eat. It’s really that simple and we’re here to help.
