Thank Guard for helping hungry Ohioans
Many of us are undoubtedly at our limits with oneyear retrospectives on the COVID-19 pandemic. But I’m sharing one more look-back on the past year because it’s perhaps the only one that leaves me feeling encouraged. I hope it will leave you feeling that way, too.
One year ago, several hundred Ohio National Guard and Ohio Military Reserve members were deployed on a humanitarian mission at Ohio’s foodbanks. I can say, without hyperbole, that their arrival at foodbank warehouses, as the state implemented its stay-athome order, was a lifesaving event.
Every day since they have served — through a hot summer, a COVID-19 surge in the fall and a snowy Ohio winter.
They have packed tens of millions of pounds of food, loaded emergency boxes into countless cars, driven pick-up and delivery routes across the state and helped our network navigate the logistics of a hunger relief crisis response amid a pandemic. Some have since been hired on permanently in foodbank warehouses.
Maj. Gen. John C. Harris, Ohio’s adjutant general, has talked to national news outlets from PBS to “60 Minutes” about the mission. Throughout their time keeping food on the tables for hungry Ohioans, Guard members have even rescued a car crash victim and provided interpretation services for Spanish-speaking foodbank clients.
All of them have become family and have earned the admiration and gratitude of more people than they will ever know.
As a longtime anti-hunger and anti-poverty advocate, I know there are ways in which our governments have failed to rise to the occasion the past year, and indeed, the past 245 years.
I know that systemic racism is built into too much of the fabric of our public policy.
I know that we live in the wealthiest nation in the world, yet more than 1 in 4 Ohio kids were food insecure in 2020.
I also know that the Dewine administration responded swiftly to our foodbanks’ calls for help. Ohio’s bipartisan congressional delegation came together to urge an extension of the federal funding authority for the National Guard deployment on COVID-19 missions.
Federal relief, including the most recent American Rescue Plan, remains vital for the 2 million people we now serve.
With federal relief on the way, the Ohio General Assembly has an opportunity to invest in a full and inclusive recovery through this state biennial budget process, and I’m hopeful they will do so.
Most of all, I know as this one-year mark passes that I could never put into words the relief we felt as foodbanks when those soldiers and airmen arrived at our warehouses last March.
I’m deeply saddened, as we all are, that a crisis of this magnitude occurred to necessitate their deployment. But on behalf of our network and the Ohioans we serve, I could not be more grateful for their service and sacrifice.
If you would like to channel your grief, frustration or hope as you reminisce about one year of this pandemic, would you send a thank you to the Guard members still serving? Send them in care of our foodbanks, with our gratitude for everyone who has pitched in a donation, a kind word or a helpful hand this year.
As for the coming year and beyond, we remain proud and humbled to be there when our neighbors need us.
Lisa Hamler-fugitt is executive director of Ohio Association of Foodbanks.