In their 2025 ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) report, the United Ways of Kansas shared that 48% of Riley County residents are ALICE or below the poverty level. This means almost half of our neighbors, co-workers, friends, and families are struggling with essentials like food, housing, transportation, childcare, and health care.

Recognizing that donations to the Flint Hills Breadbasket typically decline after the holiday season while hunger persists year-round, Souper Bowl Weekend was created to raise awareness of food insecurity in our community and to collect food and funds for the Breadbasket.

This year, we invite all local churches, faith communities, schools, clubs, businesses, families, and friends in the Manhattan area to raise food and funds during the week of February 1-9, 2026. Groups of all sizes are welcome to participate. Every contribution helps us reach our goal, and your participation is critical to the success of this effort.

Everything you need to know about the drive can be found on the Flint Hills Breadbasket Souper Bowl 2026 page at www.flinthillsbreadbasket.org. There you can find the list of most needed items, links to register your drive and help it run smoothly, and ways to provide financial support. Let us help you plan and execute a fantastic drive by using the tools on our page!
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You can reach out with any questions to us at Director@fhbbmhk.org. Together, we can make a
difference for families facing food insecurity in Manhattan. Thank you for considering this opportunity to serve our neighbors in need.
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Cordially,

Karla Hagemeister, Executive Director
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It sure feels good when you’re ahead of the trend. In a December 13, 2024, article in The Washinton Post (How Free Grocery Stores are Easing Hunger and Fighting Waste), Karla Marie Sanford highlighted the evolution of free grocery stores from their roots in food pantries. Key differences between a free grocery store and a food pantry are the stores’ focus on dignity and choice, with language, policies, and practices that value each person. In this developing model, barriers to access such as income limits and employment requirements are replaced by an emphasis on seeing each person and meeting them at their need.
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The reason for a person’s need is irrelevant when you exist to provide access to healthy food choices. It’s right there in our mission- healthy food choices.

Visitors to The Market in 2024 have an experience reminiscent of Genie’s lamp in Alladin- “phenomenal cosmic power, itty bitty living space!” We have a lot to offer, but not enough space to do it right. Only three or four guests can shop at a time. It is not uncommon for more than twenty guests to be waiting outside when The Market opens, creating a nearly constant wait in a space that is too small. One bathroom serves the whole facility. There is one office in the building, immediately adjacent to the bathroom. A kitchen serves as a break area, a walkway, and a space for semi-private conversations. In other words, it is way too small, and spaces have to serve too many purposes all at once.

Guests deserve a space made for them.
Guests deserve a calm atmosphere.
Guests deserve short wait times.
Guests deserve room to move.
Guests deserve each visit to be a pleasant experience.

Coming in May 2025, The Market @ FHBB will have the floor space and layout of a small grocery store. Our new location will match our physical program to our values and practices. With spaces designed to be functional today and flexible for the future, our board and staff are excited to see these values become a reality. ​

For a while, I was on WIC and SNAP while to help support me and my small human. This story paralleled my mother’s when I would get from the grocery store and cook with my kiddo. To optimize what I got for my family, I made sure to start my list with items from WIC, then on to necessities for breakfast, lunch, dinner and kid snacks and tried to save using my debit card for cleaning products, diapers, wipes, toilet paper and other things SNAP does not cover. Even after all that planning, I needed to be savvy with cooking on a strict budget like my mother.
 
One of the favorite meals I would make is my favorite from childhood, Chicken Adobo. It’s savory, sweet and a little acidic depending on how much vinegar you want to add. Though optional, the best way to eat this is over jasmine rice with sliced green onions. 

For a PDF of the recipe, CLICK HERE.​

​The families comprised an incredibly diverse tapestry, with the only commonality in selection being that they had at least one teenager, a stage where parents lose some control over their child’s choices, living in the home. She wanted to understand their relationship with food- what they fed their children, how they did it, why they made the choices they made. She wrote from a place of empathy, free from judgement, which allowed parents (mostly moms, but a few dads) to be vulnerable about one of the most fundamental and often complicated jobs of parenting- feeding your children.

Out of many aha-moments, one observation in particular rose to the top. Never will there be a conversation about food insecurity that does not start with access. Increasing access to healthy food choices is obvious, and critical. But seen through the lens of Flint Hills Breadbasket today, another piece of the equation is equally important. Time. Time is a resource that most of us lack, with many feeling like an overscheduled mess most days.

But take a moment to think about time as a tangible, limited resource. What is your tolerance for time invested in grocery shopping? Are you still ordering online and picking up? Is it a family affair? Is it a solo escape while the rest of the family is otherwise occupied? Whatever amount of time you are spending to secure food for your family each week, I am almost certain that it is less time (and less complicated) than most of our guests. The Breadbasket is currently open for 2.5 hours four mornings and 4.5 hours one afternoon each week. Each day we are open, there are at least twenty or more people waiting outside an hour before we open. There is space for three, maybe four people to shop in The Market at a time. These two issues come together to mean that a weekly visit to the Breadbasket for much needed food can easily take over 90 minutes.

Our guests are expending considerable time and effort to secure the most basic essentials to feed their family. Could you tolerate that time commitment? How frustrated would you be by the end of that trip? How many ways would run through your head of how you could have better spent that time? Would you feel respected and valued? I wouldn’t.

Moving to a new location that has four times the dedicated space for shopping will return time to our guests. Shopping in The Market will look and feel like an uneventful trip to the store, as it should. Without a long wait in tight quarters at all extremes of Kansas weather, a visit to the Breadbasket will rise in value for everyone- guests, volunteers, and staff alike. Creating a physical space that reflects our value for human dignity and develops our ability to build community is an opportunity that cannot be missed.
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The book is available at the Manhattan Public Library or for loan from our own shelf of relevant and compelling books.

​2024 Goals:

1. Mobile Market
2. S.H.O.P. (Senior Homebound Outreach Program)
3. Facility Planning
4. Service Enterprise
5. Parking Lot

Part of our mission is to "Build connections with community partners". This part of the mission is for our organization and other organizations to work together to better support our community. This is is reflected through the first 2 goals: Mobile Market and S.H.O.P.

Mobile Market - We're planning to launch the Mobile Market during the first half of this year. This bus was aquired through a relationship built with ATA. They donated a retiring bus to us so we can make the dream of connecting with parts of our community that can't make it to FHBB. We want to bring our market to them.

The other way we're looking at our word of 2024 is by taking the definition of build that is to construct something by putting the parts together. This connects our next 3 goals: Facility Planning, Service Enterprise and Parking Lot.

Facility Planning - We've grown and changed a lot in the last few years. The number of households have more than doubled since 2022 but our walls have not. Our space capacity and building planning is a goal that will span through the coming years.​

Parking Lot - We're excited to see the city lot shared with the Douglass Activity Center taking steps towards a new and shiny parking area. It has taken a while longer than expected with some unexpected construction barriers that pushed the project into the winter months. This is not a goal we can control, but it helps our personal goal of practicing patience and our ability to adapt to new situations.

There are many other goals we have as we start on the journey of 2024 and other projects we're excited to share with our community. As we take more steps into the new year, we'll keep our word, BUILD, as the guiding theme and continue towards our vision that there is No One in Need Among Us.

Thanks Friends,
Jennie & the FHBB Team

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