TAKING HUNGER OFF THE TABLE
Rising demand for food means more food banks are becoming permanent fixtures as the pandemic continues
For the past six years, Woodside Bible Church in Pontiac served less than 30 families each week from its food pantry at the worship center off Auburn Road, nestled in front of two of the city’s low-income housing complexes.
Everything changed for them this spring, and for every other organization responsible for filling the hunger gap across the nation.
An analysis of 181 food banks in Feeding America’s national network conducted by the Associated Press found that the amount of food distributed through places like Woodside rose dramatically this year — by 48.6% during the first two quarters after the pandemic began compared to the four quarters prior.
Year over year, those same food banks distributed 56.6% more food in the third quarter of 2020 than in the third quarter of 2019.
Those statistics show what Ryan Russell, pastor at Woodside, has feared since the spring: The trifecta of need that began then, historic unemployment, a lack of federal financial relief and children po
tentially losing access to school meals, continues today without much end in sight.
“We’re seeing over 100 families on average every two weeks. We know from our
work in the community that there’s likely 2,500 people just on the east side of Pontiac who are food insecure,” Russell said. “We’re just trying to do our best to feed them.”
The church is one of several partners working with Forgotten Harvest in Oakland County to establish new food pantries or bolster existing operations. The nonprofit, along with Gleaners Community Food Bank of Southeastern Michigan, are two food banks in Feeding America’s network of roughly 200 organizations across the U. S.
Since March, Gleaners has been averaging 6.7 million pounds of
food given out to an average of 150,000 households each month. More than 90,000 emergency food box distributions for seniors, 23,000 for low-income families and 7,750 for veterans have also been distributed.
Food insecurity data provided by Gleaners shows that the number of children in Oakland County who aren’t sure where their next meal might come from has doubled since 2018 from 8.2% to 16.4% in 2020.
Forgotten Harvest’s distribution through its 240 agency partners also rose significantly this year. The first quarter of 2020 saw 9.1 million pounds of food delivered. In quarter three, that spiked to 12.2 million pounds.
All in all, the nonprofit is coordinating about 140,000 pounds of food every day according to Chris Ivey, director of marketing and communications.
“We’ve seen a 50% increase in people in the pantry lines from what our partners are telling us,” Ivey said. “Some of them are coming in and it’s their first time needing help, but it’s also a lot of familiar faces.”
The nonprofit launched 17 mobile sites this spring to deliver food into communities. One such site that began at United Wholesale Mortgage on South Boulevard in Pontiac was turned over to Woodside in May. Now, a Forgotten Harvest truck delivers food biweekly to the church as a permanent partnership.
“When COVID-19 first hit, a lot of our pantries shut down because they were run by seniors who were high risk. So in order to keep the food going, we turbo- charged our mobile pantry program,” Ivey said. “Many of them have transitioned into full-time pantries. The program continues to date with no cutoff, we can’t run these mobile pantries alone without our partners.”
Across the nation it’s estimated that nearly 21 million households have turned to an organization for food assistance in the last week of October and the first week of November, according to a recent Census Household Pulse survey. More than 7 million said they had received food from a food bank or pantry.
It has become a commonplace sight these days for Woodside’s parking lot to be filled to the brim with cars every other Friday morning. Families begin lining up sometimes hours beforehand. Others take the bus, or are transported by the church through one of its other various programs. Some walk, usually from the two nearby housing developments, in which case Woodside provides shopping carts for them to carry everything home. They receive about 10 days to two weeks worth of food.
The food insecurity wrought by COVID-19 is a heavy weight on an already taxed hunger safety net primarily run by nonprofits. The statistics themselves are usually derived from who is visiting food banks and pantries, meaning there’s always a possibility that there’s more demand.
The mobilization of food delivery, primarily made out of necessity for COVID-19 safety precautions, also has its upside in that there’s more programs that exist across the state now actively seeking new areas of need.
“Our goal going into 2021 is to keep doing what we’re doing. As the need continues, we’re going to find ways to keep feeding the community,” Ivey said. “That’s what we do, and we’re grateful for the outpouring of support we’ve received this year. It takes a lot, but we have to keep these emergency pop- up pantries going.”