No Relief for Nation’s Food Banks

Demand for aid surges in wake of welfare overhaul

Nonprofit food banks and soup kitchens are changing their operations to cope with swelling demand from needy Americans.

Many are expanding the types of services they provide, such as job training and counseling, while others are using new tactics to better attract volunteers and reach more clients.

Despite the strong economy, hunger-relief charities say they face staggering increases in requests from people who can’t afford groceries. The growing lines at food charities are a direct result of changes in the welfare law Congress passed in 1996, nonprofit leaders say. Many people who were forced to leave welfare because of the time limits Congress imposed have succeeded in finding paying jobs, but month after month they turn to food banks because their wages are too low to make ends meet.

In New Mexico, for example, food-bank leaders say demand for aid caused by the welfare law is the No. 1 reason that the state now has 500 charities that give away food, compared to 250 in 1995. The food banks expect to distribute 12 million pounds of food this year, compared to the 1.5 million they distributed the year before the welfare law was overhauled.

“It isn’t a coincidence,” says Melody Wattenbarger, president of the state food-bank association and head of the Roadrunner Food Bank, in Albuquerque. The number of food-stamp recipients in the state dropped by 25 percent between August 1996 and December 1999. But at the same time, Ms. Wattenbarger says the state’s food banks are seeing a record number of requests from people with low-paying jobs who need food aid on an ongoing basis. Hunger-relief groups “are being called on to do day-to-day supply they were never designed to do,” she says.

The story is similar throughout much of the country. The U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that requests for emergency food assistance in 26 cities increased by 18 percent last year alone, the biggest annual jump since 1992.

“The pressure on our food pantries has increased since 1996,” says Doug O’Brien, director of public policy and research for America’s Second Harvest, a network of food banks. “Welfare reform is working to get people off welfare, but it’s not working at changing people’s lives. It just transferred many of their problems to the private sector.”

To better meet those demands, many hunger-relief groups are now expanding their programs and making other changes.

For some, the changes have meant adding hours to make it easier for people with jobs to get help. Yorkville Food Pantry in Manhattan’s Upper East Side has begun staying open on weekends to help the working poor. The Cherry Street Food Bank, run by Northwest Harvest in Seattle, has changed its closing time from 5 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. to accommodate downtown employees rushing over after work.

To help recruit volunteers to sort and distribute increasing supplies of food, many hunger-relief groups have also extended the hours during which people can help out. Albuquerque’s Roadrunner Food Bank recently has gone from a 40-hour to a 60-hour week, opening at 8 a.m. and closing at 8 p.m. each week day, to give its volunteers greater flexibility and to encourage new ones to participate.

Many food organizations are also making more systemic changes. In addition to collecting, warehousing, and distributing surplus food, some hunger-relief groups have started to:

• Figure out what help food recipients need in addition to groceries, such as aid with housing or health care, and help clients find government and charity programs that can assist them.
• Offer job-training programs aimed at giving food recipients the skills to become bakers or chefs, or to get other jobs related to the food industry that generally pay more than minimum wage.
• Provide management advice and other assistance to churches and charities that have started food-distribution programs in the last few years, but that often don’t have the skills needed to keep the program running or to distribute food safely and effectively.
• Monitor the clients who receive food repeatedly to help evaluate the impact of welfare changes.
• Advocate for legislative and administrative changes to help the poor.

“All of this is stretching food banks in new ways,” says Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank.

Hunger Rising

National figures help shed light on why so many charities feel under pressure to serve more people.

The robust national economy has helped cut the number of American households facing food shortages from 10.5 million in 1996 to 9.2 million last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the one segment of the population that saw an increase in food shortages was those people whose income falls between 50 percent and 130 percent of the official poverty line — the category that would include many former welfare recipients.

Another study, by the U.S. General Accounting Office, found that the number of people who receive food stamps fell 27 percent from April 1996 to April 1999. But it also found that many of the people who met the financial requirements for the food-stamp program were not taking advantage of it.

The report cites a number of causes, including actions by some states and local governments to try to deny food stamps to people who violated the new welfare rules. Such restrictions have since been struck down by federal courts.

Charities say some people have mistakenly believed that they were automatically ineligible for food stamps if they went off welfare assistance.

In some states, people have been required to reapply for food-stamp benefits several times during a year. “If you’re working as a waitress, that means you have to tell your manager you need the day off to go apply for food stamps, and that’s just not going to happen,” explains Sharon Daly, vice president for social policy at Catholic Charities USA. “You end up with the choice of getting fired or going without food stamps.”

Legislative Advocacy

Charities have found that other roadblocks faced by food-bank recipients require legislative fixes.

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank recently has begun working with local and federal government officials and lawmakers on a range of poverty-related issues. For example, it worked with other groups to get a bill passed that would simplify and shorten the state’s 21-page application for food stamps. Gov. Grey Davis signed that bill into law in September.

But another of the Los Angeles food bank’s advocacy efforts has proved less successful. The charity recently argued for a change in the federal tax code that would give food retailers an increased charitable deduction if they donated dented canned goods and other surplus food to help feed the poor instead of selling those items to commercial salvagers. The food bank’s executive director, Michael Flood, estimates that the group will lose out on about 2 million pounds of such food this year from food retailers. But the bill stalled in Congress.

Beyond Nutrition

In addition to such advocacy efforts, many hunger-relief groups are now trying to help clients deal with problems that go well beyond getting sufficient nutrition.

Many of the affiliates of Catholic Charities USA have put a system in place to note which people repeatedly have trouble getting food and then interview them to determine what problems they face and recommend ways they can get aid from government and other sources.

“We’ll ask, Are you paying for day care? Do you know about day-care subsidies?” Ms. Daly says. “We’re telling them about what alcoholism, substance-abuse, or mental-health services are available.”

Emergency food programs “are becoming the front-line social-service network,” says Beverly Cheuvront, director of communications for the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

The coalition has seen the number of its food-pantry and soup-kitchen members grow from 700 five years ago to 1,150 today. And it has seen requests for emergency food in the city consistently escalate, rising by 28 percent in the past year alone.

Ms. Cheuvront says that during a recent visit to a small food pantry in the Bronx that was started by a local charity last year, she found workers not only “swamped with requests for food” but also “struggling to find housing for a pregnant woman whose home had burned down and to arrange a funeral for a man whose family didn’t have the cash to bury him.”

The coalition is helping its recent members cope with demands for such services through a new program called the Emergency Food Action Center.

“We offer workshops and help train small groups to be more efficient, to fund raise, to use a computer,” says Ms. Cheuvront.

Other food-relief leaders are also looking for ways to train the growing number of novice managers in how to use volunteers to help meet increased demand for food.

“A lot of people have warm hearts and deep commitments, but they don’t know how to balance the books or about safe food-handling practices,” says Mr. Bolling of the Atlanta food bank, which hopes to pull together volunteer-training information for the 700 charities that it distributes food to.

From Pantry to Co-op

Many food-related groups have also begun taking part in welfare-to-work programs, training people to cook so they can get jobs in the food-service industry. The 46 community kitchens that are part of America’s Second Harvest reported that they have had about 500 people take part in such training programs over the past year.

Mr. Bolling of Atlanta sees programs like his organization’s, which train food recipients to cook, operate a fork-lift, and do other jobs, as key to helping people get out of poverty.

Beyond that, Mr. Bolling suggests that food can be used to strengthen communities. “We have suggested to some of our stronger pantries that they should consider moving from a pantry to a co-op,” which uses recipients of food to help run the programs, says Mr. Bolling.

Studying Hunger Trends

Many hunger-relief workers are looking for ways to stamp out poverty permanently so the need for their services will be diminished.

Numerous organizations are collecting data to base new policies on, as well as helping to evaluate the effects of current and proposed legislation.

The New York City Coalition Against Hunger is “in the very early stages” of developing a policy institute or think tank that would bring together scholars, advocates, and emergency-food providers to propose solutions to hunger problems, such as how to develop a more efficient food-delivery system in the city, Ms. Cheuvront says.

Other charities are preparing for a possible downturn in the economy, which would very likely exacerbate the problems faced by the poor, they say, and could cause demand for help to go well beyond the capacity of food banks.

Northwest Harvest, in Seattle, has started raising money for a reserve fund that so far has collected $631,009 toward its $2.5-million goal. It also hopes to build a $7.5-million endowment and then use the interest earned from it to pay for the food bank’s administrative costs each year.

“We’re in a booming economy,” says Ellen Hansen, director of community affairs for Northwest Harvest. If the demand is already this high, she says, “what the heck is going to happen when things go south?”