In the midst of a pandemic that has stifled the national economy, the nonprofit SeaShare is seeing an increasing demand for seafood from food banks, including those in Alaska.
“Protein is the hardest to access and the first item to run out at food banks,” said Jim Harmon, executive director of the hunger relief organization on Bainbridge Island, Washington. “There’s no doubt about it. One in six Americans are now food insecure. Unemployment is still over 10 percent. The need for food banks has never been greater.”
Harmon said that SeaShare at this point has gone through all the seafood it has received free from harvesters and processors and now is more focused on areas like San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Oregon that can help pay some of the costs of getting the seafood there.
“Food banks never want to pay for the food, but they will help pay for the costs,” he said.
In early August a Coast Guard crew aboard a C-130 aircraft from Air Station Kodiak delivered 12,000 pounds of fish to Kotzebue. In June, with help from Trident Seafoods SeaShare sent 14,681 pounds of seafood to the Southeast Alaska Food Bank in Juneau. So far this year SeaShare has delivered some 113,000 pounds of seafood throughout Alaska, Harmon said.
SeaShare has also put freezers in Dillingham, Bethel, Juneau, Kodiak and St. Paul for these communities to use for the donated fish.
Over the past 24 years, SeaShare has delivered over 220 million servings of seafood to food banks and feeding centers nationwide.
This year, with the pandemic still in processing, SeaShare is seeing a 40 percent increase in demand over a year ago, Harmon said.
SeaShare has been fortunate to receive recently two unsolicited grants from private foundations, plus a third donation from people they know, he said.
SeaShare is also the only organization allowed to receive, through a federal fisheries permit, prohibited species catch. So far this year that has brought in 62,000 pounds of salmon and halibut from the groundfish A season and more, primarily chum, is anticipated during the B season, he said. For this seafood SeaShare must provide the freight, cold storage and processing costs to turn the fish into fillets and steaks that are then packaged into family sized portions, Harmon said.
SeaShare’s first donors were fishermen on the decks of their boats. Today the nonprofit’s dozens of partners also include a range of entities, including those in the transportation business. The complete list of partners is at seashare.org/work
More information about SeaShare and how to donate is at seashare.org.
