For Jill Dixon, one of the standout moments of working at a food bank through the pandemic came in a mall parking lot in November 2020.

Dixon, the current deputy director of The Food Depot, was coordinating a drive-by food distribution early on a Saturday morning. That week, several local grocery stores had temporarily closed their doors because of COVID-19 outbreaks among their employees, and The Food Depot had picked up a lot of food from those businesses to give it away before it spoiled. Dixon and one other colleague were first on site in the pre-dawn morning. 

“It was dark still,” Dixon said. “… All you could see were headlights, wrapping around the mall — multiple times.”