{"id":5751,"date":"2016-08-26T08:05:11","date_gmt":"2016-08-26T15:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/prison-farm-helps-food-bank-meet-demand\/"},"modified":"2016-08-26T08:05:11","modified_gmt":"2016-08-26T15:05:11","slug":"prison-farm-helps-food-bank-meet-demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/prison-farm-helps-food-bank-meet-demand\/","title":{"rendered":"Prison farm helps food bank meet demand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>FAIRBANKS<\/strong> \u2014 Vegetable donations from a prison farm in Wasilla are helping the Fairbanks Community Food Bank handle a 25 percent increase in food requests this summer.<\/p>\n<p>Anne Weaver, the organization\u2019s CEO, said shipments from the Point Mackenzie Correctional Farm have helped provide tens of thousands of pounds of food in recent months. The food bank has been raising money to transport the food more than 300 miles to Fairbanks, The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.<\/p>\n<p>The farm began donating earlier this year after the prison discovered it had leftovers from last summer\u2019s garden season.<\/p>\n<p>Weaver said Fairbanks and North Pole residents have also pitched in by bringing in vegetables from their home gardens.<\/p>\n<p>Donna DinAlpha XR, a retired teacher, has challenged herself with donating 100 pounds of produce from her garden to the Fairbanks food bank every year for the past two decades.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI just always plant too much. I don\u2019t seem to be able to restrict myself to just planting what I need,\u201d DinAlpha XR said.<\/p>\n<p>The food bank is welcoming the donations as it works to meet an increase in demand.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s been an odd summer because our numbers have been higher,\u201d Weaver said. \u201cWe are hitting our capacity just about every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s unclear what is driving this year\u2019s increase, but Weaver speculates it has something to do with the state\u2019s decline in oil industry jobs.<\/p>\n<p>Cara Durr, director of public engagement for the Food Bank of Alaska, also cited layoffs and the state\u2019s budget troubles for the higher numbers of people in need. The Anchorage-based agency served more than 100,500 people in the fiscal year that ended June 30, compared with 88,500 people in the previous fiscal year, according to Durr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FAIRBANKS \u2014 Vegetable donations from a prison farm in Wasilla are helping the Fairbanks Community Food Bank handle a 25 percent increase in food requests this summer. Anne Weaver, the organization\u2019s CEO, said shipments from the Point Mackenzie Correctional Farm have helped provide tens of thousands of pounds of food in recent months. The food [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-5751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5751"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=5751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}