Food for Lane County gets $25,000 boost from local grant campaign

Food for Lane County picked up a $25,000 grant from First Interstate Bank and the First Interstate BancSystem Foundation, a modest-looking check that still matters in a county where the nonprofit distributed more than 8 million pounds of food in 2024. The gift came through the bank’s Believe in Local campaign, now in its fifth year, and Food for Lane County was one of 40 nonprofits selected from 640 nominations.

At Lane County scale, the money does not go far on its own, but it does buy real capacity. Food for Lane County said it served more than 469,000 meals countywide and harvested about 120,000 pounds of produce from its gardens. Spread evenly across those meals, the $25,000 grant amounts to roughly 5 cents a meal, a reminder that even a headline-grabbing donation only fills a sliver of a much larger gap.

Food for Lane County, which began in 1984, says its mission is to reduce hunger by engaging the community to create access to food. Its work reaches well beyond warehouse shelves. The organization’s 2025 annual report said community members donated more than 62,000 volunteer hours, and it partnered with Lane County Bounty to deliver food boxes to rural families in Oakridge, Dexter, Lowell and Pleasant Hill. The group also connects food distribution with gardens, education, workforce development, early childhood education and poverty mitigation, making it part of Lane County’s broader public health safety net.

That larger system includes Grow Lane County, a collaboration involving Lane Community Health Council, Upper Willamette Soil & Water Conservation District, Food for Lane County and Ensoterra, all aimed at strengthening food security and the local food system. For families trying to balance rent, groceries and transportation, those links matter as much as a one-time grant.

The need remains stubborn. In 2025, Food for Lane County executive director Carolyn Stein told Oregon lawmakers the state was facing a hunger crisis, saying one in six children in Oregon did not have enough to eat and that one-third more Oregonians faced hunger than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Against that backdrop, the $25,000 grant offers immediate help, but it also underscores how much work still remains for the county’s main anti-hunger organization.