Community
Class by class, children at Ascent Academy in Salt Lake City file into the school playground and wait their turn at the mobile food pantry.
Under the pantry truck’s white awning, cheery volunteers greet the kids with friendly banter and nutritional facts as they hand over bags of groceries, all free of charge, for the students to take home.
No child at this school living with food insecurity needs to go hungry tonight.
The parade of classrooms happens once a month at 70 schools in Utah during the nine-month school year, explains Ginette Bott, president and CEO of the Utah Food Bank, which coordinates the program.
“It is absolutely the most heartfelt thing when a child looks up at you and says, ‘I'm so glad the food bank’s here. We get to have dinner tonight.’ ”
Utah Food Bank, a Feeding America member, serves all 29 counties in Utah, distributing more than 65 million pounds of food, household and hygiene supplies, and diapers each year through over 300 partner agencies and food pantries.
Since 2011, organizations, foundations and companies have joined forces to sponsor the mobile pantry program in schools. The sponsors provide volunteers to distribute the food, and the food bank lends the truck and driver and a school coordinator.
All children at the participating schools are invited to accept food, so there is no stigma, Bott says. In Utah, one in five children are at risk of missing a meal today.
“We make it equitable and comfortable and with an element of dignity for the kids,” she adds.
Enbridge Gas Utah is a proud sponsor of the Utah Food Bank’s mobile school pantry program. While we currently provide an annual $7,500 grant, we also empower our staff to volunteer to distribute the food to the students at our sponsor school, which is near our operations in the West Valley area of Salt Lake City. In 2025, our staff distributed more than 1,400 pounds of food to 2,500 kids.
Our support for the Utah Food Bank also includes contributions to its Kids Café Thanksgiving event, which provides a Thanksgiving meal for approximately 250 children, and has over the past 15 years. In 2025, we provided $7,500 to the cause as well as volunteers for the day—as well as another $7,500 grant for its new diaper bank.
