The Free Lance has covered the move of the Community Pantry to
its new location, but I wanted to know more. I am, after all, the
Mobile Skeptic: I had uncharitably imagined a typical client to be
the legendary single mother who would rather have another child and
get aid than find a job, who drives a fancy car and who uses her
food stamps to buy Twinkies.
The Free Lance has covered the move of the Community Pantry to its new location, but I wanted to know more. I am, after all, the Mobile Skeptic: I had uncharitably imagined a typical client to be the legendary single mother who would rather have another child and get aid than find a job, who drives a fancy car and who uses her food stamps to buy Twinkies.
Last November the Community Pantry moved to a 5,500-square-foot warehouse on San Felipe Road, an increase of about 1,500 square feet from its old location, which in addition to being too small, was slated to be torn down.
The old location became too small when executive director Mary Anne Hughes’ outreach efforts worked better than she expected. The Community Pantry began receiving 20 to 25 applications a day, and in a short period it went from preparing around 864 bags of food a week to preparing an average of 1,084 per week in February.
The Community Pantry provides supplemental food to members who pay an annual membership fee. The fee is determined on a sliding scale, where somebody who is 175 percent over the poverty line pays the maximum, and those who are at the poverty line or below pay nothing. All members donate several hours of time each week filling bags or doing other needed tasks in the warehouse or office.
According to Mary Ann Hughes, the percentage of single moms has been shrinking, and members are often intact families where both parents work. Even so, the percentage of people paying nothing for membership – in other words, at or below the poverty line – has been increasing.
Why is there poverty in San Benito County?
The reasons are tied to many of the issues that we all struggle with in other ways: changes in agriculture, the housing boom of the 1990s followed by the sewer moratorium and slowdown in the housing market, the presence of illegal aliens, and the rise in energy costs.
We have all felt the effect of these phenomena, but for food service workers, agricultural workers, day laborers and the elderly on fixed incomes, the result is that the money is just not there to provide for all basic needs – at least not without two jobs or help like that from the Community Pantry.
Some members are undocumented aliens, who don’t even show in the statistics on joblessness or poverty because they fear that using social services (which generate statistics) would expose them.
Agricultural jobs now are of shorter duration, cutting the income of those workers.
The cannery, which used to operate for six months, enabling a worker to live on his or her earnings plus unemployment for the whole year, is now only running for about six weeks.
The building slowdown, a blessing in some ways, has meant layoffs and less work for day laborers.
Even for those with secure jobs, or the elderly on fixed incomes, higher sewer costs, the cold winter with high energy bills, and landlords passing along their own higher costs to tenants have also produced a need for supplemental food.
Luckily, our community is generous, with individuals contributing to canned food drives and growers such as Phil Foster Ranches and Frazier Lake Farms, among others, contributing surplus produce. In addition to welcoming donations of food and money to keep the bags filled, they will be starting a capital campaign soon to make their base of operations even more stable.
