Alliance Healthcare Services & Feed the Needy Partner Up to Address Food Insecurity Alongside Mental Health Care
- Alliance Healthcare Services
- Nov 27
- 2 min read
This Thanksgiving week, something powerful happened in the Alliance Healthcare Services parking lot.
Our maintenance team loaded up vans with 50 food boxes—100 boxes total when you count the perishable and non-perishable packages—all thanks to a partnership with Feed the Needy, a Memphis organization that's been fighting food insecurity for 30 years.
The scene was simple but significant: boxes being carefully loaded, routes being mapped to our Douglass and Whitney locations, and our team ready to deliver not just food, but dignity and hope to the clients we serve.
Why This Partnership Matters
Here's something we know in behavioral health: you can't effectively address mental health or addiction recovery when someone is worried about where their next meal will come from. Food insecurity and mental health are deeply connected. When families are struggling to put food on the table, stress compounds, anxiety increases, and the path to wellness becomes even steeper.
That's why this partnership with Feed the Needy is about more than holiday goodwill—it's about removing barriers to healing.
Intentional Care Across Our Programs
What makes this collaboration especially meaningful is how thoughtfully it was coordinated. Natlin Bauer, who oversees our housing programs, worked to ensure the food boxes reached clients across Alliance's continuum of services:
10 boxes for our Broad Avenue clients
10 boxes for Northill Wood clients
10 boxes for our STAY (Supportive Housing Assistance) program participants
3 boxes for SAFETY NET clients
19 boxes distributed through therapists who identified clients facing acute need
This wasn't a random distribution. These boxes went to families our team knows are struggling, to individuals working hard in their recovery, to people who might otherwise face an empty table this Thanksgiving.
About Feed the Needy
Ruth Rawlings-Banks founded Feed the Needy in 1994, starting with just 50 families in South Memphis. Today, the organization distributes hundreds of thousands of pounds of food across the Mid-South during major holidays, partnering with Memphis Police, schools, churches, and organizations like Alliance to identify families in need.
"Hunger and poverty go hand in hand and has no race, no gender," Rawlings-Banks has said. Her organization recognizes that food insecurity touches every ZIP code in Memphis, and they've made it their mission to ensure no family goes hungry during the holidays.
The Power of Partnership
This collaboration reflects what's possible when community organizations align around a shared mission: the wellbeing of Memphis residents. Alliance Healthcare Services has served Shelby County for over 50 years, and we've learned that comprehensive care means addressing the whole person - their mental health, their housing, their food security, their connections to community.
We're grateful to Feed the Needy for their generosity, to Natlin Bauer for her coordination, and to our maintenance team for their patient, kind delivery of these boxes. Most of all, we're grateful to serve a community where organizations come together to ensure that everyone (regardless of their circumstances) can sit down to a Thanksgiving meal.
That's the Memphis we believe in. That's the partnership in action.