Sunrise Outreach Center of Yakima

Sunrise Outreach Center of Yakima (SOC) is a County wide Christian based social and human services organization.  We were incorporated in February of 2009 as a 501c3 non-profit.  We operate entirely in the public sector; we neither promote nor require any participation with religious programming for the services we provide.  

 Our Mission Statement: Community solutions for hunger and homelessness.

We are strategically located where low-cost community solutions are most needed throughout the Yakima County. We are focused on four primary objectives: Feeding Families, Housing our Homeless, Community Mobilization and Organizational Networking.  The first two are what we do; the latter are essentially how we do them.  Our approach is three-fold; provision of basic services (which are temporary), intervention measurable sustainability with supportive services and prevention which interrupts the cycle of intergenerational poverty, primarily through education.

SOC currently operates:

• Six food pantries located in Yakima County 
• Two Weekend Meal Backpack programs that feeds 175 school children during weekends in the Mabton and Mt Adams School Districts.
• A sandwich outreach program which provides sandwiches, water, and hygiene items to the homeless and is open Monday thru Friday. 
• Case Management for the homeless 
• A Community Help Centers located at our Yakima office

The Food Pantry Program: 

According to the WSDA 2019 Food Assistance Report, 1 in 4 Yakima County residents received food from an EFAP food pantry compared to the state average of 1 in 6. This data coincides with Yakima County’s higher-than-state average of people living in poverty, unemployment rate, and households receiving SNAP.

As the only organization in Yakima County operating six food pantries, Sunrise Outreach Center (SOC) has a large impact in addressing localized hunger. During the last food bank calendar year, we served 37,856 total households and 137,365 individuals. True to our philosophy of reaching the most vulnerable, our food pantries reached 55,060 children and youth aged 0-17. Our food pantries also distributed 2,271,360 lbs. of food and served over 29% of the total households using food pantries in Yakima County.

The six food pantries SOC operates are located the towns of Yakima, Sunnyside, Mabton, Wapato, White Swan and Wiley City.  Mabton boarders the Yakama Nation, Wapato and White Swan are in the Yakima Nation. Our impact is perhaps most impactful in these three communities.   In White Swan 93% of the city’s households utilize our food pantry services. In Mabton 87% of the city’s households utilize our food pantry services.  And in Wapato 73% of the city’s households utilize our food pantry services. Especially for White Swan and Mabton the food pantries are part of their community's life blood amid a food desert where there is no local grocery store providing affordable, nutritious foods.

The Mabton community has a 90% Hispanic / Latino population.  The White Swan community has an 80.7% Native American population. The Wapato community has an 84% Hispanic / Latino population and a 6% Native American population.

On average the SOC Food Pantry program serves 3154 households representing 11447 individuals each month.

A 2001 study published in the American Journal of Public Health by Alaimo, Olson, Frongillo, and Briefel observed the associations between food insufficiency, family income, and health among preschool and school-aged children. In the study:

“Food insufficient” children and teenagers were more than twice as likely to have repeated a grade and missed more school days. Forty percent of food insufficient teenagers had repeated a grade as compared with only 20.7% of food sufficient teenagers. Food insufficient children and teenagers were also more likely to have psychosocial problems than those who were food sufficient: food insufficient teenagers were more than twice as likely to have seen a psychologist, almost three times as likely to have been suspended, almost twice as likely to a lot have some difficulty getting along with others, and four times as likely to have no friends.” (Ross, 22-23)

Food provision is prevention in that it directly impacts health and development. Many low-income households must choose between paying rent and eating dinner. The food provided in our weekend backpacks, and pantries, directly offsets other important bills and indirectly prevents homelessness.

For the past ten years SOC has been partnered with School Districts, suppling weekend meal backpacks.  SOC purchases the food for the backpacks and delivers the food to local high schools where each week the high school students pack the food for the backpacks to be distributed by the grade school counselors.