The Nosara Food Bank (Banco de Alimentos de Nosara) was founded in 2013 to provide food and other household necessities to families living in extreme poverty in the Nosara District. In 2021 the Nosara Food Bank is helping alleviate food insecurity for approximately 160 individuals a month, planting household gardens for families and schools and partnering with the CEPIA Association to provide low-cost birth control.
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TheNosara Food Bank was founded in 2013 to provide food and other household necessities to families living in extreme poverty in the Nosara District. Before the COVID economic downturn food baskets were distributed monthly from the FUCAN Building in Nosara and contained enough rice and beans for each family member for one month, as well as flour, sugar, corn meal, coffee, cooking oil, salt, pasta, tomato sauce, toilet paper, toothpaste, toilet paper, diapers and laundry soap.
Members of the Nosara Food Bank Board are active in local neighborhood development associations, churches, and businesses. Needy families throughout the district contact them via social media channels and a Nosara Food Bank phone number.Beneficiaries are mostly elderly people, single mothers, people who have had abad accident and cannot work and persons with disabilities. At the height of the economic downturn in the spring of 2020 the Nosara Food Bank assisted approximately 1,500 families. At the current time, the Nosara Food Bank is helping alleviate food insecurity for about 60 families. The Nosara FoodBank partners with the Banco de Alimentos de Costa Rica to procure food for a small administrative fee and purchases additional food in bulk from Rinde Mas and other low-cost grocery stores. Assistance from the Nosara Food Bank is only for emergency relief and where extreme poverty and hunger exist.
The Nosara Food Bank has two other projects to serve the Nosara families with limited resources. Partnering with theHarmony Projects company the Nosara Food bank installs regenerative household gardens for families who receive food bank assistance and more recently has expanded the project to include vegetable gardens at local elementary schools.
With partner Proyecto Vida Mujer of the CEPIA Association the Nosara Food Bank is sponsoring low-cost IUD clinics for women of limited means to help them with family planning. Proyecto Vida Mujer provides the IUDs and medical supplies, Clinica Reina de los Angeles of Nosara donates the medical suite and the Nosara Food Bank provides a free pap smear.
Every February the Nosara Food Bank conducts a Back-to-School drive to help public school children return to school with necessary school supplies such a backpacks and notebooks. In 2021 the food bank provided hygiene items to help local schools and preschools comply with mandated COVID-19 sanitary measures. Copy paper, teacher supplies and folders were distributed to help teachers cope with the preparing hundreds of take-home lessons made necessary by the blended learning model in which students stayed home from school several days a week but were still required to do lessons. Over sixty percent of schools in our area did not have an internet connection and only twenty-five percent of homes have a computer on which students can do online lessons.
In January of 2020 we helped a local family completely replace the contents of their burned down home in La Esperanza de Nosara.
In March of 2020 we organized the COVID-19 Emergency Fund to immediately provide food assistance to people in the district who lost their employment when the country closed its borders to keep its health system from collapsing.
During the months of the zero-tourism season due to COVID-19 we have distributed over 7,300 food packages benefitting approximately 12,000 people.
In September of 2020 we started a household garden project with the help of corporate donor Harmony Projects to give families the training, tools, material, and seedlings to start regenerative gardens. As of May 2021 the Nosara Food Bank has installed seventeen gardens, four of which are located at elementary schools.
In October of 2020, the Nosara Food Bank, partnering with Proyecto Vida Mujer of the CEPIA Association, sponsored a low-cost IUD clinic for women of limited resources to have access to birth control. A Nosara Food Bank donor paid for pap smears for all the participants and Proyecto Vida Mujer donated theIUDs and medical supplies necessary to run a month-long clinic. DoctorJennifer Jimenez of Nosara donated 120 hours of her time and her office to the project. The project started again in April of 2021 at Clinica Reina de losAngeles with Dra. Jimenez providing her medical skills and has provided over 200 hundred women access to a low-cost, natural and effective method of family planning.
(Photo Credit: Matthew Chenet)
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