Northern IL Food Bank Gets $1.6M Donation, Largest In Its History

GENEVA, IL — The Northern Illinois Food Bank recently received the largest gift in its 37-year history, with more than $1.6 million set to help the organization provide hundreds of thousands of meals amid the coronavirus pandemic and beyond.

The organization’s board of directors last week approved the gift from the estate of Lois and Neal Oppenheimer, of Lombard, who supported the food bank for more than a decade before their deaths in 2018 and 2019, respectively, according to a news release.

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Julie Yurko, president and CEO of the Geneva-based food bank, said the Oppenheimer’s seven-figure gift "will have a tremendous impact in helping us provide food and hope to our neighbors for years to come."

"With this gift, the Oppenheimers have created an incredibly meaningful and lasting legacy to help solve hunger in Northern Illinois," Yurko said. "Their stewardship of their good fortune means that hundreds of thousands of meals can be shared with our neighbors in need."

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The Northern Illinois Food Bank provides food to a network of 800 pantries, soup kitchens and other organizations throughout 13 counties in the region. The food bank distributed almost 7.3 million meals and more than 60,000 emergency food boxes in May, according to its website.

The food bank’s pop-up markets provided more than half-a-million pounds of food to 9,000 families in May. Its mobile food pantries also delivered 500,000 meals last month. The Northern Illinois Food Bank said it is providing 50,000 more meals each day, or about 1.5 million more meals per month, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.