Helping the Hungry

May 1, 2007 12:00 PM

           

Regardless of income, food is the second largest expense for families raising children, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), accounting for 15 to 20 percent of all expenses. That's why a paperless system in Los Angeles County is working to make food distribution to the hungry more efficient, using a simple ID card to speed the process.

In Los Angeles County alone, hunger affects 214,000 low-income adults, with another 561,000 at risk, according to a 2004 policy brief issued by the Center for Health Policy Research at UCLA. Through the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), the USDA purchases nutritional food and makes it available to CSFP state agencies such as the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank (lafoodbank.org) to store and distribute to low-income seniors over the age of 60. The demand is high in Los Angeles County because of the high cost of living.

“In 2004, we developed custom software to create a paperless system to track recipients of food kits and issue the kits more rapidly,” says Weldon Wu, IT director, Los Angeles Regional Foodbank. “At each of our sites, we service a couple hundred clients within a couple of hours.”

When individuals sign up for the program, the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank issues them an ID card to speed up the data entry and tracking process. Each card has a magnetic stripe programmed with a special ID number. When the food kits are distributed, the recipient shows his or her ID card, the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank representative swipes the card through a reader, and information on the card tells the representative what kind of kit that person is to receive. “It speeds up the process of looking up records,” Wu says. “We no longer have to search for that person's profile in his or her application.”

To print the ID cards, Wu and his staff use the Persona C25 Card Printer from Fargo Electronics, Eden Prairie, Minn. It prints double-sided cards, including the magnetic stripe. “We did our research online,” Wu says, “and purchased a printer to handle our expected volume. Since then, we have printed at least 5,000 cards. We never anticipated such a high volume. This printer has lived a lifetime already.”

The Persona C25 is a mid-range card printer with built-in RAM to process and print cards simultaneously. Using a dye-sublimation process, the printer transfers images directly onto cards by heating a print ribbon beneath a thermal printhead. As a result, it can produce more than 16.7 million colors.

The cards themselves are similar and store only a client's application number. “Working with a government program, security is a big issue,” Wu says. “We don't want to store anything on the card that could compromise a person's identity or be used in a malicious way if the card were lost. We don't want to endanger a client. We just want to simplify the process.”

“The ID cards are accomplishing what we want them to do in terms of data entry and speeding up the search for our clients,” Wu says. “We wanted to develop a best practices operation, using technology to create a paperless application that could be a model to others. We thought that was the best way to get as many food kits out as possible and still be very efficient.” He is pleased that other food banks outside of California are planning to use the same system.

The changing food industry is affecting food supplies coming into programs such as CSFP, according to Wu. More food is being sold outside of the United States and finding its way into more secondary markets instead of warehouses. Nevertheless, Wu is not discouraged. “We may have limited resources, but we can still use technology to be more efficient,” he says. “We need to feed as many people as possible.”

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