Food pantries dig in as need rises
Pantry director builds relationships as she works to meet increasing need
BY MICHAEL CRUMB
Andrea Cook, program director of Partnership Place in Johnston. Photo by Duane Tinkey
“This world might be falling apart in 100 ways but if you can’t make one person feel fed, you can’t expect children to learn, you can’t expect health issues to go away if people don’t have food. It is just as basic as it comes.” – Andrea Cook, program director of Partnership Place, Johnston.
Food pantries and food banks across Iowa are seeing the effects of what some describe as a perfect storm as they see sharp increases in the number of people seeking assistance following the reduction of SNAP benefits earlier this year, compounded by the effects of inflation and high gas prices.
The Business Record sat down recently with Andrea Cook, the program director of Partnership Place in Johnston, to learn more about how the pantry is coping with the rise in need and what challenges may still lie ahead. The pantry offers food, clothing, personal care items, diapers and even dog food, as well as mentoring programs and food support for the school district.
Through the third week of June, Partnership Place, a member of the Des Moines Area Religious Council’s food pantry network, had seen a 64% increase in the number of families served, compared with the entire month of June 2021. The number of unique individuals visiting the pantry was up 87%. Nearly 500 families are visiting the pantry each month.
In some places across the state, numbers are exceeding those recorded during the early months of the pandemic.
For Cook, her job is all about building relationships, whether that’s with the more than 100 volunteers who give their time each month to keep the pantry open or those who visit to get food to put on their family’s table.
With the increased stress her team faces, Cook makes sure to touch base with each of them every day to make sure they are doing all right. For those who visit, she makes them feel welcome, reaching out to touch the shoulder of one woman who thanked her for opening the pantry from 4 to 6 p.m. because it’s easier for her to visit during those hours or sharing compliments with another visitor over the woman’s eyeglass frames.
“Relationships are important everywhere,” Cook said. “When you talk about people who have very little income, who don’t have literal currency to share, those relationships are everything. No matter why they’re here, we don’t judge. We always assume it’s for a good reason. It’s just very important for people to have that connection to not feel like they have to tell a story as to why. I don’t need to know, I’m glad they found us.”
Here’s more of what we learned from our conversation with Cook.
Are you seeing an increase in first-time visitors to the pantry?
This month [June] so far we’ve had up to 40 who are brand-new, and this time of year that’s not normal. We have a form we have to sign once a fiscal year, so it’s very easy to track because starting July 1 everyone signs it, so in July and August we have a lot of people signing it, but you get to April, May and June, everyone has been here before. But this year that’s not the case.
Traditionally, the busiest months for a food pantry are October through December. With the increases you’re seeing now, are you concerned about the pantry’s ability to handle that demand later in the year?
I’m definitely concerned. The monetary donation part of it, we’re definitely seeing that level off. We just went through our budgeting process and I did not raise our donation amounts. I pray that they stay level. I really can’t predict that, but I’m definitely thinking if we see a 40% increase over a typical October, November, December, it’s got me worried. I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy about it.
What is the message you would tell the community about the need to keep food insecurity in the spotlight?
The need has always been there. It’s not going to go away. There is always a way for someone to help. Every bite of food that hits my plate, while I paid for that, it wasn’t all me. There’s a whole machine that we’re all interconnected with and a part of, and if there’s one thing the pandemic taught us is that interconnectivity is razor thin in so many ways. That flap of the butterfly wing over there, that impact’s huge over here. That’s just all the more in my mind as we move forward in these very unpredictable and expensive times. If you’re finding yourself struggling, I guarantee there’s somebody who is suffering worse and carrying that burden longer. If you feel like you’re not doing enough, there’s always a way to help, and those little things really do make a difference.
What can you say to help people overcome the stigma that may still exist in visiting a food pantry?
People ask me all the time who comes to our door. You name it. We see everybody. Any person you encounter in your day. There are 1,000 reasons why somebody might find themselves coming to our door. It’s literally anybody. I guarantee that in the course of your day, everybody is encountering at least one person who has been to a pantry in the past month. It’s not a character flaw to need assistance. There is nothing you have done. There are so many factors working against people. More than 80% of the adults that visit here are employed. Most are double employed, usually underemployed, but they have to work two to three jobs to be able to afford a family of four and basic living expenses. It has nothing to do with how hard you work or what job you’ve chosen that determines if you’re hungry.
Do you often see people who have used the pantry later paying it forward by volunteering or donating when their circumstances have improved?
All the time. We hear from people who say they used our services when they needed it and now want to pay it back. It happens all the time. People recognize they were in that position and now want that to go to someone else who needs it now. It’s a far higher percentage than any of us are giving, who figure out a way to do more. They recognize the need and whether they volunteer for an hour or clean out their closet or find extras in their pantry, there’s always a way to help.
Demand at food pantries increases to levels not seen since onset of pandemic
A food assistance network that just began to catch its breath following record levels of food insecurity during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 is finding itself strained once again. The reduction in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, high inflation and gas prices nearing $5 a gallon are all taking a toll.
The number of visitors to food pantries is up. Food donations are down, and supply chain disruptions are causing the cancellation of shipments of food coming from programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“It’s kind of three strikes on a lot of people,” said Jacob Wanderscheid, executive director of the Foodbank of Siouxland in Sioux City. “We had the extended SNAP benefits go away. Then increased gas prices and inflation, and now we’re starting summer with a kind of heat wave so I’m sure people may be having the ability to turn off the air conditioning at night are having to run it a lot more because it’s hot, so we’re getting a lot of factors piling on each other.”
At the Sioux City food bank, the cost of food the agency buys has jumped 25% from 2020. That comes as food donations are down, Wanderscheid said.
“We’re seeing a lot less local donations, especially from individuals, than we were a year or two years ago,” he said. “This was the first year since the pandemic that we’ve been able to have the National Letter Carriers Stamp Out Hunger event, which typically brings 18,000 pounds of donated product through our door. This year we had 6,000, so that is two-thirds less product that came in in April. I don’t think we’ve had that small of donations since the first year in 2006.”
Wanderscheid said he believes increased inflation and fuel costs are causing more people to hold on to the food they may otherwise donate for their own use.
The food bank’s pantry network served 1,400 more individuals in April than were served in April 2021, and 1,500 more in May than in May 2021. And in May, the pantries in the food bank’s territory served 1,600 more individuals than were served in May 2020.
“And the numbers we saw then were fairly unheard of,” Wanderscheid said.
He said it’s important for people who are on the front lines in the fight against food insecurity to keep their head down and stay focused in order to meet their mission of putting food on the tables of people in need.
“While we work to shorten the line of hunger and try to get as many people out of food insecurity as we can, we’ll continue to be a supplier of food, and we know that it is not going to be a tomorrow, next month or next year solution, so I know that when people come to the food bank they know that we’re in it for as long as it takes.”
Wanderscheid said the food bank is “working our system and redoubling our efforts in contacting and making sure the food suppliers know what we’re seeing, and working with our financial donors to know that we’re not out of the woods yet, and to speak to the pressures they feel when they buy gas or go to the grocery store are being experienced by people who are experiencing food insecurity, and that we’ll continue to need their support to continue doing what we’re doing.”
The Food Bank of Siouxland has also adjusted its delivery and pickup schedule to pantries and donors to increase efficiency and offset the increasing fuel costs as much as possible. The effort was launched in 2019, but the food bank had doubled down on those efforts in recent months.
“We’ve set up delivery days in three or four different directions out of Sioux City and then scheduled pickups on the way back into town so we aren’t sending multiple trucks down the same path for different trips,” Wanderscheid said. “We’re trying to use those trips as well as we can to save on those fuel costs. That has really helped us to stretch those fuel expenses as much as we can.”
On the other side of the state, the River Bend Food Bank in Davenport is seeing a 50% increase in traffic at its pantry network in Davenport and Moline, Ill. It is also seeing a 5% decrease in food donations from distributors and grocery stores. It has also had as many as 17% of its orders from the federal Emergency Food Assistance Program canceled. The food bank receives about 25% of its food supply from the program, which is administered by the USDA.
For the Des Moines Area Religious Council, its food pantry network saw a 40% increase in April and a 60% increase in June compared with the same months in 2021, and organization leaders said that trend was continuing through June, when it recorded its busiest single day of food pantry use in the past two years on June 2. DMARC also saw more than 1,000 people use its pantries for the first time in April and May.
In May, 15,406 individuals came through the agency’s pantries. Of those, 1,200 were first-time users.
The numbers being seen in the DMARC network are above those seen before SNAP benefits increased in the early months of the pandemic.
Matt Unger, DMARC’s CEO, said the combination of reduced SNAP benefits, inflation and higher fuel costs has resulted in a much faster, steeper increase in pantry use than they expected.
“We had hoped for and thought it would be a more gentle ramp-up,” he said. “In March, before SNAP benefits changed, we had an 11% increase from March last year and over February. That’s not out of this world. When we were setting records each month before the pandemic we were seeing anywhere from an 8% to 10% increase, so we felt we were in a good spot, and then April happened and it was a 42% increase. That got our attention.”
He described the combination of factors as a “perfect storm,” and with children home from school for the summer, DMARC was on pace for a 75% increase in June over June 2021.
“We’re going to be right back where we were volume-wise before the pandemic,” Unger said. “The thing we didn’t expect quite as much is the increase we’ve seen with the number of people who’ve never come to a food pantry before. That number in April was over 90%, and May jumped 140%. Those numbers scare me because it creates a new baseline. It’s not just folks who are coming back who had their SNAP benefits reduced, but now we have this whole new universe of folks who were thrown into food insecurity that we haven’t seen before.”
The result is the pantries are ordering more to make sure they keep their shelves stocked, and the DMARC warehouse is making sure it has more on hand to meet that need, Unger said.
“We’ve been trying to get more in larger quantities, get things with really long shelf life at the best deals we can so we have supply on hand,” he said. “We’ve been able to keep up with it so far. Granted, we saw this coming so we tried to get in front of it.”
All of DMARC’s costs have increased, too, whether it be the cost of buying food or the cost of fuel for its mobile units.
Unger projects that the numbers of people visiting DMARC pantries will continue to rise through at least July, but will begin to level off.
“I would hope it’s not on the level we’ve been seeing the past three months, and then kind of see what happens with the economy and inflation,” he said.
He said the opportunity for policy changes is down the road, including the ability to increase SNAP benefits through farm bill negotiations.
“We need to look at what more can we do to get more funding in SNAP. Are there other creative ways we can look at some of these programs and look at some of the things that really worked during the pandemic? Because some of these programs were working the way they were supposed to for the first time,” Unger said. “To me that says we need to be looking at how do we get to this level so this program operates the way it is supposed to? Some of that is work we will engage in, but then we’re just going to have to be out in the community for support as much as we can to make sure we can get the food together and money together to meet the needs because no one should have to go hungry because of costs.”
Unger said it’s important to keep food insecurity in the spotlight, especially as the need continues to rise during times of economic uncertainty.
“It’s going to keep getting worse. Don’t look away, don’t stop paying attention.”