Maps Show Mismatch Between Locales of a City’s Food Pantries and Their Clients

The Hunger Task Force, a food bank in Milwaukee, had suspected for some time that the city’s emergency-food

pantries might not be located where they were most needed.

Officials at the local referral service had told the organization that hotline staff members sometimes had to refer callers to emergency-food programs outside their neighborhoods, because there weren’t any pantries nearby. “And at the same time,” says Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force, “we were looking around certain neighborhoods, and saying, ‘Gee, 10, 12, 14 pantries. How many are enough?’”

So last year, the organization went to the Neighborhood Data Center at the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee for help in mapping the locations of the city’s food pantries and other data.

The maps confirmed the charity’s suspicions. Red dots — sized according to the number of people served — marked the locations of Milwaukee’s emergency-food pantries. Some parts of the city had multiple programs clustered within a few blocks, while other neighborhoods had just a few.

Now the Hunger Task Force is using the maps to spur discussion as it brings emergency food pantry operators together to plan how they can reach the people who most need their services and avoid duplicating one another’s efforts in the process. The United Way of Greater Milwaukee has given the Hunger Task Force a grant to organize the series of meetings.

Food pantries traditionally haven’t coordinated with one another much, says Ms. Tussler, because most are run as volunteer activities — many times taken on by a house of worship.

“A lot of the volunteers are operating the pantries because they have been directed to do so by their minister,” says Ms. Tussler. “They’re doing it as a service to their congregation, not realizing that there might be a similar program three to six blocks away.”

‘Oh-No Moment’

Two weeks ago, the Hunger Task Force brought together food-pantry operators whose programs were all located in and around the same zip code. Participants at the meeting had what Ms. Tussler calls an “oh-no moment” when they looked at a map of their neighborhood and saw more than 20 food pantries. “People thought that they knew all the other providers, and they didn’t,” she says. “The duplication of effort could be seen on the map.”

The Hunger Task Force also shared maps and charts that showed other information, such as how far clients traveled to get help and what days and hours the pantries were open.

By taking the home addresses of clients, gathered from the food pantries’ sign-in sheets, and mapping them against the addresses of the pantries, the Neighborhood Data Center was able to help the Hunger Task Force analyze how far those clients were going to get help. The organization learned that, on average, clients traveled eight to 12 blocks, but that people traveled longer distances to go to pantries that had evening or weekend hours.

Ms. Tussler thinks that that kind of measurement is important because it takes the client’s perspective into account, unlike traditional service statistics, such as how many people were served and how many pounds of food went out the door, which only look at the organization’s perspective.

“As a consumer of services, people are going to go where they’re treated well, where they get their needs met, and where they find the help on the day that they need it,” she says.

Detailed Discussions

The maps and other program data encouraged participants to discuss the nitty-gritty details of running a good emergency-food program, and to think about changes they could make to improve the way they work together, says Ms. Tussler.

For example, she says many pantries are open one or two days a week, and the volunteers at the meeting were surprised by the disproportionate number of pantries open on Wednesdays — which Ms. Tussler says are an active day for many churches. As a result, several pantry operators said they could switch the days of the week that their programs were open.

Ms. Tussler credits the focus and specificity of the discussion in large part to the maps and charts, and says that the quality of the dialogue was noticeably higher than at previous gatherings of food-pantry operators.

“We would talk, and we would talk, and we would talk, but there was never anything to get your arms around,” she says. “There was no data, and without the data, whatever people’s individual perception of the need for their program was was real to them.”