Charities struggle to offer holiday meals
Historic need puts strain on Thanksgiving offerings in the area
For 27 years, businessman Eric Holm put on one of the biggest Thanksgiving feasts in the nation in Orlando, often serving — for free— asmany as 25,000 people in a single day.
But this Thanksgiving, with a global pandemic and an economic depression that has sent Holm’s 33 Golden Corral restaurants into bankruptcy reorganization, the massive gathering at Orlando’s Salvation Army has been canceled. In its place, like many charitable Thanksgiving events, the annual banquet celebrating abundance will be a downsized, socially-meals-to-go event for 5,000.
Holm and his wife, Diane, are paying for it out of their own pockets.
“We’re calling it a ‘hopes-giving dinner,’” said Ken Chapman, captain of The Salvation Army’s Orlandocommand, which will distribute the Thanksgiving meals on a first-come, first-served basis on Nov. 26. “This is the year we need to give hope because people are hurting. We want to say, at least for this day, ‘You are not alone.’”
Yet as the number of food stamp recipients soars — up as much as 40% over last year in Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties — food banks and other charities are finding themselves stretched to the limit.
“I’m the eternal optimist, but
every indicator is that the situation is going to get worse,” said Dave Krepcho, president and CEO of Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, the region’s largest charitable food source. “The numbers are just crazy. For the month of September, we distributed enough food for 8.4 million meals. That’s about 300,000 meals a day, an amount that has held steady since the pandemic began. But yesterday I looked at the October numbers, and they’re up about 10 to 12%.”
Krepcho can’t fully explain the recent increase but says it could be that people who have never needed help before used up their reserves before turning to charity.
“We know that up to 50% of the people we’re helping have never sought assistance before,” he said. “They will hold off until things get really bad.”
Similarly, the number of food stamp recipients in Seminole and Lake counties peaked in September at over 56,000 and 58,000 people, respectively. For Orange and Osceola, the number of recipients peaked in June, with nearly 282,000 and more than 98,000 people, but has only improved slightly since then.
Meanwhile, Krepcho said, millions of dollars in federal CARES Act funding that helped his organization buy food will run out by Dec. 30, if not sooner, and there has been no indication from Congress whether additional funds are on theway.
And a $1.4 billion federal program that bought surplus goods from U.S. farmers hurt by the trade war with China — which sent unsold meat, milk and produce to the nation’s food banks, including Second Harvest — ended last month.
That program also had allowed The Salvation Army to make weekly food distributions throughout the pandemic, feeding some 375,000 people over the past eight months.
“It’s a big blow to us,” Chapman said of the program’s end.
The Salvation Army will still give out some 500 boxes of groceries with turkeys, side dishes and dessert ingredients on Nov. 24 to mark Thanksgiving — in addition to its to-go prepared meals two days later — but this time funding will come from the charity’s own reserves.
Similarly, Second Harvest is now turning to local contributors to cover the gap between supply and demand, and Krepcho worries that so-called donor fatigue will set in by January.
“We’re concerned that people will be saying, ‘Hey, I gave to you during the summer; we’re tapped out,’” he said. “We know jobs are not coming back quickly in our community, we have eviction notices going out by the hundreds, and the old affordable housing crisis here certainly has not gone away. It’s very scary.”
But Chip Hanna, executive director and the lone full-time employee of Servant’s Heart Ministry in Pine Castle, said he has been inspired by response of the public in these historically difficult times.
“It’s me, one part-time guy, a warehouse, a 1996 Isuzu box truck with the floorboards rotting out … and a lot of people stepping up to help,” he said. “Before COVID hit, we were serving about 120 families with weekly grocery boxes and last week we served 237.”
To do that, he said, it takes 20 warehouse volunteers and 50 volunteer drivers—every week.
“I don’t want to say that anything good has come from COVID, which has been such a horrible thing,” said Hanna, who is hoping to bring Thanksgiving groceries to some 300 individuals and families. “But as a ministry, it is just motivating us to do more.”