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East Whatcom Regional Resource Center Building 2

Community Facility, food bank

Vast stretches of eastern Whatcom County are classified as a food desert by the USDA: a substantial share of residents are low-income and lack easy access to a supermarket. This lack of access to healthy food was making the community sick. A broad cross-section of residents, farmers, nonprofits, and government agencies came together to figure out how to ensure their neighbors could access healthy food. This collaboration evolved into Opportunity Council’s creation of the East Whatcom Regional Resource Center Building 2, which integrates substantial community input from a community design process.

This building houses the Foothills Food Bank and two community meeting spaces (one of which also serves as the distribution room for the grocery-store/client choice model food bank). Its walk-in cooler and freezer allow food to be stored at scale. An outdoor covered area on site serves diverse community purposes, including basketball and other year-round youth activities, a farmers’ market, and outdoor summer film screenings. Working closely with Foothills Food Bank personnel, we developed a layout that maximizes efficient flows of both people and food, from delivery to sorting to packaging to distribution. The flow of food includes produce grown by the community in the adjacent community garden, rinsed in the stainless steel gleaning sink donated by Environmental Works and fabricated by a local metal worker. Future photovoltaic panels will reduce electricity bills, so these nonprofit partners can focus their limited resources on creating healthy food access in the foothills of Mount Baker.