Local pantries struggle to meet needs
Rain, wind or hot summer weather aside, local residents gather
at Veterans Park in Hollister with one goal in mind
– to keep local families from going hungry for one more week.
The Community Pantry, in conjunction with Second Harvest Food Bank
of Santa Cruz and San Benito Counties, dole out paper bags filled
with bread, canned goods and meat or dairy products.
Georgina Martinez first turned to the Community Pantry a year
ago, when her husband passed away unexpectedly. She has five
children and found it difficult to get food on the table each week.
She and her children volunteer their time in exchange for the bags
of food they receive.
Local pantries struggle to meet needs
Rain, wind or hot summer weather aside, local residents gather at Veterans Park in Hollister with one goal in mind – to keep local families from going hungry for one more week. The Community Pantry, in conjunction with Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz and San Benito Counties, dole out paper bags filled with bread, canned goods and meat or dairy products.
Georgina Martinez first turned to the Community Pantry a year ago, when her husband passed away unexpectedly. She has five children and found it difficult to get food on the table each week. She and her children volunteer their time in exchange for the bags of food they receive.
“I’m married again and with the extra stress, it’s good to get out of the house and volunteer,” she said. “I meet more people out here.”
But it is the extra services that helped her family most through the year.
“They provide birthday cakes for birthdays,” Martinez said. “They take donations of clothes for families and help with referrals.”
Some of the people gathered around picnic tables across the street from the softball fields are members of Community Pantry, such as Martinez, who pay a small yearly fee of $15-40 and volunteer time in exchange for a few bags of extra food a week.
Many of the people gathered – young men, senior citizens and truck drivers – are volunteers with Community Pantry. Nearly thirty people are gathered Wednesday morning and they set up an assembly line that keeps going from noon to 2 p.m. They are surrounded by the smell of day-old breads and pastries, not-quite-ripe bananas and this week, a treat of Mission Tortillas, donated by the company.
Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz and San Benito Counties will honor many of its volunteers and donors March 30 at Leal Vineyards. They will recognize two hunger fighters of the year and top holiday food drive collectors.
Juanita Medeles, a Hollister resident, has the distinction of being San Benito’s 2006 Hunger Fighter of the Year. At 82, she has been a Community Pantry volunteer for more than six years and helps three to four days a week.
“I do whatever I can to help,” she said.
Medeles recruited volunteers from her own family and works on educating local seniors and Latino families about the services available at Community Pantry.
But while next week, Second Harvest will recognize the enormous support they receive throughout the year, their focus year-round is on alleviating hunger.
Local pantries such as St. Joseph’s Family Center in Gilroy and Community Pantry in Hollister are the places that local families turn to supplement their weekly food needs.
“I organize the food going out,” said Vicky Martin, the food distribution coordinator. “We are seeing an increase.”
Nearly all of the families served by St. Joseph’s are considered extremely low-income, though many of the households have at least one adult working outside the home.
“They can come in every 15 or 16 days for the supplemental food program,” Martin said. “It frees up income for other things than food.”
Hunger advocates are pushing to address the long-term causes of hunger, health concerns over poor nutrition and the red tape that keeps locals who qualify from applying for federal assistance. The weekly offerings from pantries are meant to serve as emergency food supplies, but a recent survey conducted by America’s Second Harvest has found more and more people are relying on local pantries for longer periods.
“[The client base] grows steadily over time,” said Mary Anne Hughes, the director of Community Pantry. “But lately I’ve been taken aback. We averaged 886 bags during the first four weeks of this year, but now we are at 910.”
When community pantry opened its doors in 1989, the organization put together 35 bags a week for clients, Hughes said. Even three years ago, volunteers and staff could put together 400-500 packages to serve all of San Benito County.
Now, the pantry has more than 1,500 registered members, though they don’t all show up every week.
“If they did, we would not have enough bags,” Hughes said.
The 2006 National Hunger Study, conducted by Second Harvest Food Bank, found that as much as 66 percent of the population faces food insecurities and as many as 18 percent experience hunger.
One of the striking findings of the survey is that a large percentage of the households served by local pantries have at least one working adult in the home – nearly 40 percent.
Community Pantry is the main food bank serving San Benito County and it receives donations from a variety of sources including Second Harvest, local grocery stores and the Ag Against Hunger program.
“We got romaine lettuce, salad greens,” Hughes said. “This week we got carrots and bananas.”
The pantry has a small budget for items that are not donated and Hughes uses the money to purchase protein and calcium-rich items such as meat, fish and dairy products. St. Joseph’s receives food from Second Harvest, groceries and donations from locals. St. Joseph’s purchases about a quarter of the items for its food baskets, including baby formula, eggs, cheese and meats.
Items that serve as “delicacies” among the pantries include tomatoes, bell peppers and other chili peppers.
“We get these things in smaller volumes and save them for people with dietary needs,” Hughes said.
Many of their delicacies come from the Plant-A-Row program, which encourages local gardeners to plant an extra row of vegetables or fruits to donate to a local pantry.
“The kids love grapes,” Hughes said. “They are a specialty. Most of these donations come from home gardeners.”
Hughes and the volunteers try to meet special dietary needs as much as they can, but they are often at the mercy of the donations they receive. She attended a western regional conference sponsored by Second Harvest last week where she and other hunger advocates debated their role in providing nutritional education and food.
“It’s coming up more and more,” she said. “We have people with special needs who will tell us they have cancer or diabetes.”
Nearly three-fourths of people served by pantries and more than 90 percent of those served at soup kitchens said they could not afford balanced meals, Second Harvest’s survey found. One in five people interviewed for the survey said someone in their household had diabetes.
Some of the factors leading to poor nutrition are the high cost of fruits and vegetables at local grocery stores and a lack of information about healthy cooking, the survey found.
At her recent conference, Hughes said people weighed in on both sides of the debate.
“Some said if you don’t take what you are given, donors will stop donating,” Hughes said. “Others say if we lecture them on what to eat, we aren’t treating them like adults but taking on the role of parents. Still the other side says we aren’t helping them if we just give them garbage.”
Hughes falls in the middle on the debate. This week’s bags included candy that had been donated.
“One volunteer said, ‘Oh no,'” Hughes said. “But to me, we take the things that get donated. We try to get produce and fresh stuff – and when I purchase things I am careful to get calcium and protein.”
St. Joseph’s comes up against the same problem.
“Unfortunately we are limited to what [donors] offer,” Martin said. “What they do offer tends not to be low sugar.”
St. Joseph’s also offers a hot meal program for seniors that meets their health needs, hot meals for the homeless three times a week and daily bag lunches for the homeless.
The recent survey also found that a majority of the people using local food banks – as many as 77 percent – would qualify for federal nutrition programs such as food stamps, the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC), school meal programs or the Healthy Children and Families program. Unfortunately, in San Benito and Santa Cruz counties, only 13 percent of those who use pantries are enrolled.
“California has one of the worst application processes in the United States,” Hughes said. “Several pantries have an advocate who identifies those who qualify and helps them fill out the [paperwork].”
Community Pantry is considering an advocate to help San Benito residents who would qualify for federal programs. The paperwork is so challenging, Hughes said, someone would need a junior or senior high school level education to complete the forms, something many of the people served at the pantry lack.
In the meantime, Hughes and the volunteers will continue to serve locals each week, though Hughes still wonders how to address long-term hunger issues.
“We are really meant to help people for six to eight months until they get back on their feet,” Hughes said. “More and more, we are getting more people, but not as many are dropping out.”
