WATERTOWN, N.Y. — The Northern New York (NNY) Community Foundation says it’s providing a $30,000 grant to the Food Bank of Central New York to help pay for the expansion of its distribution center on Interstate Island Road in Van Buren in northwest Onondaga County.

The Food Bank of CNY has an 11-county service area, including parts of the North Country. In Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence counties, the Food Bank partners with 70 different food pantries, soup kitchens, backpack programs, and other organizations to provide nutritious foods below cost.

In turn, those organizations serve hundreds of North Country families, providing emergency food assistance to residents who couldn’t otherwise access nutritious foods, the Community Foundation said.

The Food Bank is a “longtime” Community Foundation partner. In 2017, officials opened a North Country office on the third floor of the Northern New York Philanthropy Center in Watertown. It also has a permanent endowment and charitable fund at the Community Foundation to support its work in the tri-county area.

“Each year, the Community Foundation and its donors help supply nearly every food program across Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence counties and each dollar goes further because of the efforts of the Food Bank of Central New York,” Rande Richardson, executive director of the Northern New York Community Foundation, said in the announcement. “As has been true before, we feel this additional investment in the Food Bank’s capacity will benefit the residents of Northern New York in important ways and strengthen local food pantries for years to come.”

“We are thankful to the Northern New York Community Foundation for its recent support of our 34,000-square-foot expansion of our distribution center. Every day, thousands of pounds of nutritious food is distributed throughout our 11-county service area which includes Central New York, the Mohawk Valley, and the North Country,” Karen Belcher, executive director of the Food Bank of Central New York, said in the announcement. “The decades-long partnership between our organizations has provided critical support of our work, and the work of our community partners, by helping to secure access to nutritious food.”

The Northern New York Community Foundation provides grant support annually to organizations that operate in partnership with the Food Bank, per the announcement. It cites the Food Bank as indicating one in eight people in Northern and Central New York are classified as “food insecure.” Each dollar that local food pantries and soup kitchens spend with the Food Bank can provide enough food for three meals.