About Us

Our mission is to provide healthy food and compassionate support, and to advocate for food security and social equity.

Our vision is of a community where everyone has access to the quality resources they need to thrive, including healthy food, housing, and healthcare, and where everyone is welcome, included, and valued.

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Why We Exist:

      • 1 in 4 households in the City of Poughkeepsie are considered Food Insecure. Around 26.8% of the City’s Population.

      • In Dutchess County alone 26,130 individuals suffer from Food Insecurity. That’s 8.8% of the population.

      • 4,590 children in Dutchess County are food insecure.

      • In 2021, 53 Million Americans sought help from food assistance and relief programs, like Dutchess Outreach.

What is Food Access?

Determined among consumers by the spatial accessibility and affordability of food retailers—specifically such factors as travel time to shopping, availability of healthy foods, and food prices—relative to the access to transportation and socioeconomic resources of food buyers. The consistent dependability of adequate food access helps to enable food security whereby a person’s dietary needs and food preferences are met at levels needed to main a healthy and active life.

What is Food Insecurity?

Food insecurity is defined as a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life. This can be a temporary situation for a household or can last a long time. Food insecurity is one way we can measure how many people cannot afford food.

 

What is Food Sovereignty?

The right of peoples to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.

 

Dutchess Outreach has operated emergency food access and relief programs in Dutchess County for more than 46 years. 
In Dutchess County, 26,130 individuals suffer from Food Insecurity or around 8.8% of the population. 
Of that number, around 41% of individuals are above SNAP and other Nutrition Programs threshold of 200% poverty, and 59% fall below that threshold, rendering our services even more needed. In fact, more than 46.5 million Americans seek out assistance from organizations like Dutchess Outreach because of the lack of support that public benefit assistance programs provide. 
Additionally, more than 20 years of research proves that limited access to nutritionally dense foods occurs more frequently in low-income communities, such as the City of Poughkeepsie, and that this lack of access is directly related to higher instances of diet-related diseases such as heart disease and high cholesterol in adults and diabetes and obesity in adults and children. For this reason, it has been our mission to ensure our food supply includes fresh locally grown foods from our farming partners, and food from our Urban Farm, as often as we can.  

© Mia Blas 2017

Food Banks and Food Access Centers like Dutchess Outreach continue to help fill in the gaps that individuals and families face in fulfilling their most basic needs that have been exacerbated by increasing income inequality. In the past several years, in the face of a global pandemic and community crisis, our programs are needed more than ever therefore requiring us to increase our capacity. The numbers we are experiencing now have more than doubled compared to what we saw prior to 2020.
Individuals and families who have never sought out our assistance, however, who could likely have used it at one point or another, have previously made the choice not to reach out to us for a hand up because of the stigma that has been attached to asking for help when you need it from programs that were created to provide that help. We’re seeing some clients who haven’t had the need to visit our pantry in over 20 years and new visitors every day. These are unprecedented times, indeed. The hardship our community is now faced with has left many with no other option. 

We’re here for our community!

 

In the last year alone and through the Coronavirus pandemic, our food pantry provided more than 123,600 meals to our neighbors in need by way of grocery packages for pick up and delivery. Our Lunch Box hot meal program has prepared over 88,800 prepared meals to go and to the temporary housing unit shelters. Thanks to our farming partners and the Nourish New York program, we were able to distribute more than 48,400 lbs of local, fresh, fruits and vegetables through all of our food access projects.  

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