Nexus Donates Greenhouse to Denver’s Hunger Relief Center
On May 14, Metro CareRing broke ground on a new 16,000-square-foot Hunger Relief Center at the corner of 18th Avenue & Downing Street in Denver. The center, which will be completed in February 2015, will provide fresh food access and self-sufficiency programming for food-insecure people in the metro area.
The new center will include a south-facing greenhouse donated by Nexus Corporation, Northglenn, Colorado, that will provide an experiential classroom, employment readiness training and year-round produce for Metro CareRing.
Its learning gardens will allow participants to learn best practices and techniques to successfully grow food in their own homes and neighborhoods and also afford an entrepreneurial opportunity to promote Metro CareRings products for area businesses.
In the new facility, Metro CareRing expects to distribute more than 2 million pounds of nutritious food annually for people in the Denver metro area. Sixty-two percent of the food distributed from Metro CareRings Market is fresh sourced from local grocery stores, farmers and community gardens.
In addition to food, Metro CareRing offers healthy living, nutrition and financial literacy classes, provides on-site job readiness training, and is one of Colorados largest providers of utilities assistance.
The City of Denver has provided $590K toward the construction of the center, and The Anschutz Foundation served as a lead donor on the project. A Rooftop Learning Garden will be built courtesy of The Kitchen Community.
Founded in 1974, Metro CareRing is the largest hunger-relief organization directly serving people in Denver. Metro CareRing has been operating out of its current 4,500-square-foot facility since 1999, when it first offered 22,000 services annually. In 2013, Metro CareRing provided 133,00 services and educational programming within that same and severely over-crowded space.
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