For a lot of families, the hardest part of getting help from a food pantry isn’t qualifying for it — it’s getting there. The Food Bank for Central & Northeast Missouri has a fix for that: a program called Project DASH that delivers food boxes straight to the doors of neighbors who can’t make the trip themselves.
Instead of a food-bank truck or a volunteer’s car, Project DASH runs on DoorDash. Drivers pick up pre-packed boxes at the Food Bank’s Columbia distribution site, The Market, at 705 Business Loop 70 W, and deliver them to neighbors within roughly 10 miles who face transportation barriers, according to the Food Bank.
The boxes themselves come together through ordinary volunteer hours. The Kiwanis Club of Columbia, which has been helping with Project DASH since 2024, recently assembled 90 boxes in just 30 minutes during one of its regular volunteer mornings — the kind of assembly-line teamwork that turns into dozens of porch deliveries by the end of the day.
“It’s a great way to start the day,” one volunteer told the Food Bank about the packing sessions — an hour of folding and filling boxes that ends up as groceries for someone across town who has no way to pick them up.
The Food Bank says it’s always looking for more hands on packing mornings, and that anyone interested can sign up for a volunteer training session through its website. Rocheport-area readers who know a neighbor without reliable transportation — an older relative, someone recovering from surgery, a family between cars — can reach out to the Food Bank directly to ask whether Project DASH reaches their address.
More information on Project DASH, and on volunteering with the Food Bank for Central & Northeast Missouri, is available at sharefoodbringhope.org.
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