Volunteers bring food to public housing residents
Program aims to deliver healthy groceries and counteract limitations found in food deserts
A new partnership allows volunteers to deliver healthy, affordable groceries to south suburban low-income public housing residents who live in “food deserts.”
The Housing Authority of Cook County is partnering with Chicago-based Top Box Foods. The first boxes of fresh produce and other food acquired through the partnership were delivered Thursday to more than 700 residents in Chicago Heights, Ford Heights and Robbins.
“This helps a lot,” said Clarise Mitchell, who lives in an apartment at the Richard Flowers Homes in Robbins. She uses a wheelchair to get around. “This way I don’t have to have someone go out and get groceries.”
Top Box Foods is a nonprofit founded in Chicago in 2012 that also serves people in Atlanta and New Orleans. Typically, the agency sells food to residents at 40% below retail cost, cofounder Sheila Berner Kennedy said.
“If you’re living in a food desert it’s hard to get healthy options,” she said.
She cofounded Top Box Foods with her husband, Chris Kennedy, former chair of the University of Illinois Board and son of the late U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Chris Kennedy unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for Illinois governor in 2018.
From a warehouse off Interstate 55 in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, volunteers with Top Box Foods fill boxes with fresh fruits and vegetables, poultry, bread and other items. Customers can pay Top Box with Illinois Link cards available to residents who qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Kennedy said.
“This week alone we will deliver more than 9,000 boxes of food,” Kennedy said. “That will make a lot of meals.”
Housing authority executive director Rich Monocchio said the partnership seeks to address residents’ concerns about food security.
“After surveying our communities it became immediately apparent that our residents were concerned about their access to healthy food and the steps they needed to take to get to the grocery stores in a safe way,” he said.
In addition to serving Richard Flowers Homes in Robbins, Top Box volunteers also delivered a truckload of groceries Thursday to the authority’s Sunrise Community Housing in Chicago Heights and Vera Yates Homes in Ford Heights.
“The housing authority is paying for the food,” Kennedy said. “They want to make sure their residents’ basic needs are met.”
Thursday’s deliveries included supplies of hand sanitizer, face masks and other items to help protect residents from the coronavirus spreading the COVID-19 respiratory disease when they have to venture outside their homes.
The new service aims to address inequality in addition to basic health and safety concerns.
Many residents of so-called “food deserts” that lack healthy produce options are unable to have groceries delivered to their homes.
“SNAP beneficiaries in Illinois cannot take part in grocery delivery services under the current program while states like New York, Washington and Oregon have begun to roll out pilot programs to address the issue,” the housing authority reported in a news release.
In other words, the state’s safety net to address hunger does not include the option of having groceries and other essentials
delivered.
“Low-income communities of color like those that HACC serves have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and many are not able to take the precautionary measures that higher-income households are afforded,” the authority said.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle visited the Richard Flowers Homes in Robbins Thursday to observe the grocery delivery operation.
“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in demand for staple food items over the past eight weeks,” Preckwinkle said. “We’re very grateful for Top Box’s support.”
Higher rates of blacks and Hispanics are dying from COVID-19 than whites, state health officials have reported.
“I think it’s brought into stark relief the tremendous inequality,” Preckwinkle said.
She was referring to how people of color who live in communities in the south suburbs typically have less access to quality employment, health care, education, nutrition, child care and other services than people in predominantly white, higherincome suburbs north and west of Chicago.
Cook County has worked to address inequality, Preckwinkle said.
“We’ve made the south suburbs a focus of our economic development work and our infrastructure investments,” she said.
Many county and municipal governments are looking at cutting staffing and reducing services amid budget shortfalls due to declines in sales taxes and other revenues.
“The problem for us is that the federal government has not compensated local units of government for lost revenue,” Preckwinkle said. “The housing authority is going to be in a position where a lot of people cannot pay their rent.”
Democrats in Congress are proposing $100 million in public housing assistance as part of the next round of economic relief, Monocchio said.
“We really need that,” he said. “Over 30 million people have lost their jobs because of this. Our resources only go so far.”