After 8 months of service at Golden Harvest Food Bank, members of the Georgia National Guard will wrap up their COVID-19 relief efforts at the Food Bank on Friday, Dec. 4. Since April, 15 servicemembers at a time have been stationed in Augusta to assist in distributing emergency food assistance to families in Golden Harvest’s 25-county service area. The Guard has been invaluable in helping Golden Harvest provide more than 8.6 million meals to people experiencing food insecurity due to the economic effects of the coronavirus in Georgia and South Carolina. 

The Georgia Guard arrived at a time when calls for food assistance had tripled, the Food Bank’s volunteer program had been suspended for safety reasons and 30% of Community Partners had closed over COVID-19 concerns. The Guard members quickly became an integral part of Food Bank operations, packing up to 800 boxes of shelf-stable food a day to send to open partner agencies across Golden Harvest’s 11,000-square-mile service area and to be used in drive-thru, no-contact Mobile Markets. 

“It’s not really possible to overstate the role of the National Guard in our operations for these last eight months. They packed boxes; they drove vans of food to rural areas; they headed up distributions to hundreds of families,” says Amy Breitmann, executive director of Golden Harvest Food Bank. “We couldn’t have done this without them.”

The Food Bank has been distributing 22% more food and served 23% more families since COVID-19 cases began appearing in the CSRA in March. Within weeks of their arrival, servicemembers began running Mobile Market food distributions, which are the safest way to provide more food to more families. Those Mobile Markets have put 2 million pounds of food into the hands of local families, a 105% increase over last year. The Guard has gone through four rotations of servicemembers in its time at the Food Bank.