Our mission is simple and direct: To lead the fight against hunger.

The facts are startling: 1 in 6 people in central and southeast Indiana struggles with hunger and food insecurity. The most vulnerable of our friends and neighbors — senior citizens and children — are at even greater risk. Twenty-percent of our elderly and our children don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

To make matters worse, many of those people who need help fall into a gap where they struggle to put food on their table and yet their incomes are too high to qualify for federal hunger-relief programs such as SNAP or free school meals for children.

On a yearly basis, hundreds of thousands of hungry Hoosiers depend on food and other critical grocery products provided by Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana. Gleaners supplies items to hunger relief agencies and schools throughout 21 counties in central and southeastern Indiana.

Gleaners was founded in 1980 and is a member of Feeding America the nation’s food bank network. Since its inception, Gleaners has distributed over 360 million pounds of food and critical grocery products to nearly 600 hunger relief agencies and partners serving needy Hoosiers. In addition to food distribution to agencies, we serve our most vulnerable populations, seniors and children, through specialty programs such as the BackSacks: Weekend Food for Kids, School-Based Pantry, Mobile Pantry, Summer Meals for Kids, and Senior Hunger Initiative Programs.

Gleaners is part of the Feeding America network of food banks. Feeding America is a nationwide network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs that provides food and services to more than 46 million people each year.