Bay Area food banks coping with critical volunteer shortage

On a typical day at the vast food bank warehouse in San Jose, 80 to 100 volunteers pack apples, oranges, pears, squash and cabbage into boxes to be shipped out to hundreds of distribution sites across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.

On Tuesday, just 17 showed up. All told, more than 1,000 volunteers have cancelled this week over concerns that working in close contact with others might expose them to coronavirus.

“Thvis is critical for us because we use volunteers to sort and pack huge trucks of produce,” said Leslie Bacho, chief executive officer of the Second Harvest of Silicon Valley Food Bank, which provides food to a quarter of a million people every month who otherwise would struggle to find enough to eat.

As the COVID-19 pandemic grows, food banks across the state, which serve about 2 million Californians annually, are facing precipitous drops in volunteers. The shortage has been particularly severe in Northern California, where the first cases were confirmed and the number of cases has grown quickly.

Meanwhile, partner organizations like churches, schools and senior living centers that host weekly food bank distributions have also started shutting their doors. Already, 19 weekly food pantries in Silicon Valley that serve 2,400 households have closed, said Bacho, who expects more.

On Friday, Bacho’s food bank announced that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her fiance have joined other tech leaders to launch a new $5.5 million COVID-19 Fund for Feeding Families. In addition, Sandberg said money from the fund would help finance a temporary workforce to keep Second Harvest running.

In San Francisco, the number of pantries that had closed jumped from 13 on Wednesday to about 30 on Thursday, out of a total of about 200. “Whoever was getting food there isn’t getting food there anymore,” said Paul Ash, executive director of the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank. “We’re really kind of scrambling.”

Food banks may start staffing pop-up food pantries in parking lots in areas where distribution sites have cancelled, Ash said. In San Francisco neighborhoods with lots of pantries, like the Tenderloin, a site closing doesn’t make much of a difference. But in areas with fewer services like the Richmond district, families may have nowhere else to turn.

“To be candid, we’re not meeting all the need right now anyways,” Ash said. “We’re going to move from an imperfect system to a little less perfect system.”

So far, the numbers of Californians seeking food have not substantially changed and food banks have found ways to keep up with demand.