Federal cuts, increased demand squeeze Vermont pantries

July 08, 2007

BARRE - The entrance to the Central Vermont Community Action Council's food shelf is an unmarked door around the back of the agency's office on Route 302. Although it is virtually invisible, the food shelf serves about 300 families a month - between 800 to 1,000 individuals - says Jim Mangene, the council's food and nutrition coordinator. "Until you need something, you don't know it exists," he observes.

He says more people are coming to the food shelf than ever. April was its busiest month. An earnest man with a graying ponytail, Mangene has provided social services for the elderly and young people, but he says he always finds his way back to working with food because "that's where our comfort is."

Mangene serves clients out of a bright, cheerful room whose dimensions he estimates at about 14 feet by 30 feet. He has no storage space. The whitewashed walls are lined with well-stocked shelves on the left and coolers on the right, one of which is nearly empty. "This morning I had lettuce, spinach and cream cheese," he says. "Then all the families came." Two-thirds of his clients are families, he guesses, maybe more.

In an average month in 2005, 10,397 families used emergency food shelves, according to a survey by the Vermont Department for Families and Children. The survey, "Hunger in Vermont," reported that food shelf caseloads increased 23 percent between 2003 and 2005.

Food shelves, or pantries, are local projects that distribute free groceries. Some food shelves belong to a food bank. The Vermont Foodbank, located in Barre, is a statewide nonprofit organization that procures large food donations from national and state sources and distributes them through its network of food shelves, soup kitchens, senior meal sites and shelters. No one really knows how many food shelves there are in Vermont. Some start up and others die off. Two years ago the state survey found 135 of them. They vary from small closets in churches to programs like those in Burlington and Brattleboro that serve more than 1,000 families a month.

The Barre, Montpelier and Woodbury/Calais food shelves are part of a haphazard safety net maintained largely by volunteers. Most of the volunteers have worked for the food shelves for years, driven by a desire to see that no one in their communities goes hungry. But a privatized system of food security means that security depends on capricious factors such as whether a town has a cadre of retirees able to devote time to running a food shelf, how talented they are at scrounging, whether the community is pinched for resources, how effectively the organization responds to the culture of those it is trying to help and how successful it is at overcoming the issue of stigma, which deters many of the hungry from going to food shelves.

More people are going to food shelves now because housing and heat have become so expensive, Mangene maintains, and people's incomes, especially those of retired people and the elderly, aren't keeping up with rising costs. "Food is where people cheat," he explains.

Mangene likes to offer nutritious food. "This morning I had turnips from Food Works. They were so sweet you could eat them raw. Someone asked what to do with them. When I explain, people take them right away," he says. He wants to start a recipe box with ideas about how to use the food shelf's food.

"I have people who don't know how to cook and others that only want stuff they can cook with, so I try to carry all of it," Mangene says. "My goal is to provide as many alternatives as if they were going to the supermarkets."

Keeping the food shelf stocked with nutritious food is a challenge because what's available is always changing. The food bank had organic salad dressing for two or three months, he said. Then it was gone. They had rice for six months, and then they had none. When he can, within the limits of money and space, Mangene stocks up. He checks the food bank's online "shopping list" every day and if there's a special on cereal, he'll buy 20 cases.

The Vermont Foodbank provides most of his stock - he picks up orders with his truck on his way in to work - but he depends on donations of food and money to provide balanced nutrition and some variety. Hunger Mountain Co-op gives him bread - "I love that," he says. Someone from Shaw's drops off pastries. The Frost Heaves just made a cash donation, which allowed him to buy eggs. And many individuals walk in with bags of groceries.

Mangene says while he can purchase bulk goods more cheaply than individuals can, the special foods they bring "add to the niceness of the bulk stuff." He calls it "food for the soul." Mangene accepts all donations. If he can provide Scope that represents money his clients will have to spend on something else: "For me, it's any way I can save them money." He'd like to have more storage space, access to a greater variety of food and a freezer. He wishes donations held steady year round (they fall off after the holidays). He'd like to figure out a way to stock milk and eggs. In short, "I'd like to know everybody is leaving with good quality food," he says.

He'd also like to serve people more often. He is less concerned about seeing some of the same people every month than about not seeing those who need help. He wants people to come to the food shelf before they've completely run out of food. "I think some people should come every month - it would make their life better," he says. "I'd like to see them use it to get ahead."

The CVCAC food shelf serves all of Washington County, parts of Orange County and a small area of Windsor County. Its policy is to provide a family with a three-day supply of food once a month.

But Mangene knows the clients he works with are not statistics. Their lives can fall outside bureaucratic parameters. A woman's spouse dies and her income is suddenly cut in half. A young man is living in a camping area with no refrigeration; he can take only a few items at a time and needs to come more than once a month. Someone arrives with a note to bring back food for an elderly man who can't get out. A couple drives to the "wrong" food shelf because it has baby food or it is open at a more convenient time. An elderly woman won't go to the food shelf in her own town because she doesn't want her neighbors to see her. A family reports only six people in the household but is also feeding neighbors or friends. "We have guidelines we have to use," Mangene says, "but personally, I would like to feed everyone that walks through the door. I'd like people to feel comfortable coming if they need to."

The issue preoccupying the Montpelier Food Pantry's board a few weeks ago was how to apply its guidelines - how to determine, fairly, who gets how much food. Volunteers used to pack boxes of food for clients, but last summer the pantry changed distribution models. Now it offers "client choice," allowing patrons to select what they want from the shelves, within certain limits. When the system was adopted at another food shelf, the director said it put an end to clients asking, "Is this all we get?" although occasionally someone would try to take a case of tuna.

The board members, sitting in a circle of sofas in the parlor of Trinity United Methodist Church, discussed client sign-in procedures, proof of residency and free choice for bread, eggs and fresh vegetables.

"If a family of six comes in, can we give them more than a dozen eggs?" a board member asked. "It's all a little bit flexible," replied Victoria King, the director.

In response to disagreements with clients over how much food they are entitled to, King suggested inviting a mediator from Woodbury College to train everyone in the organization in how to communicate respectfully with difficult clients.

"Sometimes I'm working with a client who starts to get angry, and I know there are certain words I could use (to defuse the situation)," she said. The board adopted the idea and also agreed to add a pantry client to their number.

King, a quiet school nurse with curly blond hair, is much younger than most of her volunteers. She has been director of the pantry for three years. "I got into it reluctantly," she said. "I'm not a bossy person." She depends heavily on the volunteers; she says they "make the pantry run like clockwork."

After the meeting adjourned, she explained, "Some volunteers see the same clients coming in over and over again and get frustrated. I appreciate the work the volunteers do, but I want to relieve them of the feeling they have to be a policeman. Some volunteers get hung up on particular rules."

King went downstairs to the pantry, which had just opened. The Montpelier Food Pantry occupies several rooms in church basement.

"Chris just called and said he's living in his car," a volunteer told King as she headed toward the refrigerators. The woman, who sat in a passageway registering clients as they came in, pointed to another entry in a loose-leaf notebook. "These people are living on the river by the cemetery."

Clients need only show proof of residency - a driver's license or telephone bill - to use the pantry, but the homeless sometimes lack documents.

King tries to gather certain information for the food bank, such as whether people are employed, to help the organization pinpoint how hunger is changing, but she acknowledges that the records are incomplete. Clients used to sign up at nearby Bethany Church, a throwback to of a time when the pantry was run by an interfaith coalition. King described a confusing evolution of record-keeping practices.

After a new system was implemented in January, the pantry's utilization numbers fell. "Since we started the new system, everybody had to register at Bethany again," King said. "A lot of people who were coming here realized they weren't in our area and they couldn't come any more. Some people who had lived here had moved to Barre."

She checked the refrigerators and freezers. One refrigerator was full of eggs. "There's meat in the freezers now," she observed. "We got a good price at the Foodbank - we're pretty well stocked." She looked into a storage room stacked high with cases of canned vegetables, baked beans, pasta and bulk food. "We've got tons of food right now," King said, "but sometime we get really, really low." A volunteer interrupted and asked what to do about a client who didn't have a refrigerator. "Give him more tuna, if he likes it," King told her.

An argument erupted at the "checkout" station, where a young woman had set four cans on the counter. "You're entitled to two cans, so make up your mind which two you want," the volunteer told her.

"I don't like your attitude," said a stocky, dark-haired man who was next in line. King walked over to mediate.

"We're supposed to provide seven days' worth of food once a month," she explained later. "Some of the volunteers do give out seven days' worth and some don't. One person per household can take quite a bit, but seven people don't get seven times more."

Clients who see quantities of good food want to take it, she said. They think it may not be there tomorrow. But "as soon as a client comes in who's demanding - it's probably a defense mechanism; they're probably embarrassed because of coming in - the volunteers bristle at them. They say if we give too much today, there won't be enough for people who come tomorrow. They don't want one person because they're assertive to get all the good stuff."

One of the challenges confronting the volunteers at the Woodbury/Calais Food Shelf, located north of Montpelier, is procuring enough food. Another is getting the food to the people who need it. Although the food shelf is open only one day a month (the Pittsford Food Shelf is open three days a week and the Montpelier Food Shelf, five days a week), it is heavily used. In May, the Montpelier Food Pantry served 281 adults and children. Given its urban location, that is not surprising. But the Woodbury/Calais Foodshelf served nearly 190 people on the one Saturday it was open in May.

On a fine June morning, trucks and cars filled the parking lot of the fire station annex in Woodbury. Fifteen minutes before the food shelf opened, a dozen people stood in line at the door. A silent teenage boy stood beside an older man. A neatly dressed, gray-haired woman climbed out of a rusty pickup.

Carol Ray, a preschool teacher and the food shelf's first director, and another volunteer arrived a few minutes before 9 a.m., unlocked the door and invited the first five clients to come in. A few minutes later, Elaine and Jerry Russell from Marshfield pulled up in their truck. Jerry lowered the tailgate, and another volunteer began passing boxes of USDA commodities to him. Jerry has been delivering boxes of food to people who can't get to food shelves since the mid-1980s. His route extends all the way to Northfield.

"I know if I didn't do this that the people I get the food for wouldn't get it," Jerry said. "They don't have transportation. A lot of people won't accept it because of pride. A couple of people I deliver to wouldn't come here, but because I deliver it, they'll accept it."

Some clients have been coming to the food shelf for more than 10 years. "Poverty is not a short-term problem," observed Georgia Myer, who keeps records for the food shelf. Between 70 and 80 percent of her food shelf's clientele are employed, but their jobs pay only $7 an hour. In April, a third of those helped were children; nearly as many were elderly.

"Food is the easiest thing to cut," she said. "We want to prevent that."

But preventing it is a struggle.

The Woodbury/Calais food shelf runs on a shoestring. Together, Woodbury, Calais, Marshfield and Cabot contribute $2,750 a year to the food shelf, and it receives another $1,850 a year in private donations.

"For us to completely fill the shelves, we're looking at $625 a month, including delivery costs," Myer said. "We only have $375 to spend." The volunteers' strategy is to take advantage of the Vermont Foodbank's Neighborhood Express Pantry, which provides 5,000 pounds of food for $250. However, the volunteers can't order specific items - they have to take what they get. They fill in the gaps by buying macaroni and cheese and tuna fish at COSTCO.

Federal cutbacks to a key USDA commodities program have dealt a heavy blow to the state's food shelves. The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, as the program is called, makes certain commodities available to pantries for clients who meet income eligibility requirements. The Vermont Foodbank's TEFAP allocation shrank from 1.7 million pounds in 2004 to 1.4 million pounds last year.

The food shelf provided TEFAP commodities to about 90 clients in 2002. "The number (of clients) is now double," Myer said. "Just when the numbers went up, the amount of food went down." In the 2006 fiscal year, the food shelf distributed 28,400 pounds of commodities to residents of nine towns. The following year, the amount dropped by more than half, to 12,200 pounds. In June, the food shelf received just nine cases of apple juice, Myer said.

Adding to the difficulty of feeding struggling neighbors is a critical lack of volunteers, and the fact that all of the Woodbury/Calais volunteers have full-time jobs. In April, 15 people turned out to unload the Neighborhood Express delivery. In May, only five people showed up to unload the 5,000 pounds of food and stock the shelves.

"We have 12 volunteers. We need more," Myer said. "At town meeting, every organization is looking for volunteers. We're doing this on top of taking care of our homes and lives. Employers are demanding more. People have long commutes. They're taking care of their parents."

The question is how long the fraying safety net will hold in this rural corner of the state. At a Washington County Hunger Council meeting in March, Myer declared, "I'm at the point of emotional exhaustion. None of us has any free time. If we hit the wall, we'll need to take it to the town and tell them, we can't open again until you help us."

The Woodbury/Calais food shelf's experience and the state's data suggest that something new is going on with hunger in Vermont: Not only is the need growing, the demographic is shifting. More working class Vermonters are turning to pantries to make ends meet. The state's 2005 hunger survey revealed that 40 percent of the food shelf caseload that year was made up of adults who work or are temporarily out of work. This is a departure from the occasional emergencies and "generational poverty" that account for other food shelf use.

Activists call hunger a marker for poverty. Hunger is a sign of the stress affecting working and elderly people caught between rising expenses and declining real incomes. In Vermont, it's not an option to stop paying for heat in the winter. And it's not a good idea to stop paying the rent when it goes up. So, as Mangene says, "Food is where people cheat."

July 08, 2007

Press Room