Idaho Board

A conversation with Kia Shaw, branch manager of the Idaho Food Bank. Give us an overview of the Idaho Food Bank. Speaker 2: My branch covers the lower 16 counties in eastern Idaho, so about the Montana, Utah, Wyoming border and a little bit further west, and we have a lot of fun here. Personally, I started in 2016. I was working in retail and a family friend said, “Hey, there’s a position in the food bank warehouse, and I think you’d be really good at it.” So I started down here in the warehouse and actually managed all the inventory, all the agency orders, and then became the branch manager in 2018. I’ve been doing that ever since. The Idaho Food Bank is actually a statewide nonprofit, so our main branch is in Meridian. You have the warehouse and then we have our location here in eastern Idaho, and we also have a location up in Lewiston. So across all three locations, we have about 100 employees. So we really rely on our volunteers. All three of our locations serve multiple partners in their regions in the state of Idaho. We work with over 400 community partners including food banks, senior centers, schools, shelters, and other nonprofits that want to have a grocery store location here. We work with over 140 of them. So I have ten staff members here and we can’t do everything. So we have a lot of volunteers that come and help. Speaker 1: Is it amazing how much goodness and kindness is shown by so many Idahoans?