Remember - the Other Bank program used to be a YWCA program, that had its own brick and mortar location, and provided between 200-300 households with toiletries and hygiene supplies each month; now it is a service option at the Thurston County Food Bank, where clients can receive a single 'Full Other Bank' visit and up to two 'Partial Other Bank' visits every month. Our new CEO has repeatedly expressed an interest in moving towards a wraparound integrated care model generally, and in expanding the Other Bank program specifically - this data is intended to inform their and the board's decision-making process.

'Impactful' refers to the actual and perceived value clients receive through the Other Bank program - 'Efficient' refers to the cost/benefit ratio of operating the Other Bank program vs the actual value received by clients - 'Sustainable' refers specifically to the administrative costs of running the Other Bank program, and whether its current funding is sufficient to support it into the future

Our sources of data are our client account data, which is hosted by Link2Feed and goes back to 2019; TCFB budgetary data, which I have to pry out of our bookkeeper's hands; samples of the estimated value of Other Bank items distributed in Olympia, Lacey, and at our satellite locations; and responses to our client survey.

This survey is intended to be done by clients waiting in-line to receive Other Bank services - our target sample size is 278 responses, or roughly 25% of our typical Other Bank client-load. The survey is intended to be completed in under 10 minutes.

The t-test will only be used twice - once to compare estimated Other Bank values from the Olympia food pantry and the Lacey Food Pantry, and once to compare estimated Other Bank values from the satellite locations and the food pantries. Our goal is to determine what the average value received by our Other Bank clients is, and to identify if there is a difference in value for those who receive Other Bank at our food pantries or at our satellites.
To get data from our food pantries, we will use a 'Ghost Shopper' - on Other Bank service days, 1 per month in Olympia, 2 per month in Lacey, our Ghost Shopper will enter the line and pretend to receive an Other Bank visit; they will record the items they received, and then get right back to shopping. We must get a minimum of 70 samples from both Olympia and Lacey, so that, with the Other Bank samples from the satellite locations, we can hit our target sample size of 278. This will be difficult - if we intend to do our data collection in a single month.

At the TCFB warehouse, pre-packed 'Other Bank' bags will be randomly sampled before they are sent out to the satellite locations; at least 10 individual samples will be taken taken from each satellite location's supply of 'Other Bank' items. Researchers will record the items in each bag and estimate their total value, and then will perform an analysis of variance test (ANOVA) to determine what if any variation exists in the estimated value of Other Bank items received at satellite locations. For a confidence interval of +/-5, a minimum of 278 samples of estimated value must be taken - and if 10 samples are taken from each satellite location's supply, that would make 140 samples total to be taken at the warehouse.

This will be the technique we use to analyze our client intake data from Link2Feed, as well as our payroll and budget data from the TCFB. We will use a repeated measures analysis of variance test in lieu of a dependent samples t-test because we need to compare multiple observations of the variables across a significant amount of time, while being able to limit the effect of stochastic budgetary factors (i.e. that sweet Covid $$). The dependent variables we will be testing include the number of clients who have accessed our 'Full' and 'Partial Other Bank' service options over the past four years, the total number of clients who have accessed our regular food service in the same time period, total payroll expenses credited to the 'Other Bank' program in the same time period, cost of the Other Bank program per participating household (requires the total program cost to be divided by number of households), the cost of the Other Bank program per unique client visit (requires the total program cost to be divided by number of unique visits). The 'within-subject' factors for these tests will include the calendar month (12 levels) and the fiscal year (4 levels), creating 48 separate observations for each of our six variables.