Meet Lisa Karnish the Professional Behind Our Inventory and Warehouse Operations
Hunger Task Force is 100% community supported and Milwaukee’s only Free & Local food bank. Lisa Karnish serves as the organization’s Operations Associate Manager and plays a key role in ensuring our food bank runs efficiently by guiding, coaching, developing and motivating the operations team while maintaining high levels of safety, productivity and quality service.
“One of my favorite local partnerships is the one with have with Great Lakes Sports Fisherman. There’s a freezer down at the Marina and members who don’t bring all their fish home can put it in the freezer and then we will go and pick up the fresh caught fish to our neighbors in need through our pantry network,” says Lisa. “They make it so easy for us. The fisherman will filet the fish, bag it and put it in the lockbox freezer so it’s ready to be distributed to clients in our community the next day.”
Lisa enjoys volunteering her time to facilitate Stockbox distributions. According to her, they are “full circle events.” In her role at Hunger Task Force, Lisa inventories all the food that is distributed to low-income seniors in need at a Stockbox distribution. The gratitude seniors have for this supplemental food offering they are handed brings Lisa joy and shows just how important her role is to feed the community.
As Operations Associate Manager, she also supports continuous improvement training for the operations team and provides effective supervision to develop a strong inventory management workforce and ensure control and accuracy.
When asked what she thinks people would be surprised to learn about Hunger Task Force, she responded that the agency employees just under 70 staff members.
“When I tell people our workplace size, they are in awe of how much we can get done with a small workforce,” adds Lisa. “What they don’t often realize is that nearly 20,000 volunteers support our operations – at our warehouse and farm – annually. Without them, we couldn’t feed the 50,000 children, families, veterans and seniors in our community each month.”
Hunger Task Force does not charge local pantries, soup kitchens, low-income senior sites and homeless shelters food, delivery or network membership fees. We believe that healthy, culturally relevant food should be provided free of charge based upon need, not upon an organization’s ability to pay. Annually, we distribute nearly 10 million pounds of food to feed children, families, seniors and veterans in need in our community.
Hunger Task Force is Milwaukee’s Free & Local food bank and Wisconsin’s anti-hunger leader. The organization’s core values are Dignity, Justice, Equity, Compassion and Stewardship. Hunger Task Force feeds people today by providing healthy and culturally appropriate food to hungry children, families and seniors in the community absolutely free of charge. Hunger Task Force also works to end future hunger by advocating for strong public policies and nutrition programs at the local, state and federal level.