Who are the hungry?
She arrived at the pantry to shop one Wednesday evening just as we were closing. “Thanks for being here. I’m completely out of food and I’ve got 3 jobs. It’s really hard to get to the pantry. For all my jobs, I have absolutely no money and I have no time to eat if I do have food.”
Several states passed minimum wage legislation on November 4. But there is still much more work which needs to be done.
OUR POLITICIANS ARE DOING NO ONE A FAVOR BY NOT RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE.
Minimum wage workers don’t make enough money even to buy food. It takes 2 minimum wage jobs just to pay the rent.
HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE NOT ALL UNEMPLOYED. It’s estimated that 10% of the homeless people are employed – they just don’t make enough money to pay rent.
When a person works at the minimum wage level s/he is not making a real contribution to society because there isn’t any money for healthcare. When a minimum wage person becomes ill, the symptoms are ignored until things become so bad that a trip to the e.r. becomes necessary.
As few as 20 years ago, hourly workers made enough money to pay rent, buy food, get to work, pay taxes.
The value of the minimum wage has eroded and economic security has declined to the point where economic inequality has increased. People are no longer poor. They are destitute.
Our country needs people who can make a contribution to our community, our state, our great nation.
Our country needs workers who make a wage high enough to buy food, pay rent, get clothing, and pay for medicine/medical bills, transportation, taxes.
So, here we all are at pantries all over this country – feeding people while politicians in Washington cut programs, causing poverty, and, in general, making things worse.
THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR ANYONE IN OUR GREAT NATION TO GO HUNGRY.
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog – Peggy’s Take Outs- Meet some of the homebound shoppers at the Good Neighbor Food Pantry
The people who received the food were all in a situation of need.
With homebound people, the longer a person is uninsured, the worse the health becomes. Some people simply can’t get to a pantry. They lack the health and/or resources to leave their homes.
Most, but not all, of the homebound were elderly. Good nutrition is critical to the health and life quality of seniors. Because of issues related to age, including decreased mobility, limited outside assistance and fixed incomes, the elderly can be especially vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition.
The elderly poor desperately need to use a pantry. This group desperately resists visiting a pantry as long as possible. The tragedy here is that food pantries are our tax dollars at work. we seniors have paid our taxes all our lives and now we have an opportunity to get a return on the investment.
When a senior citizen doesn’t get enough to eat, the children and grandchildren suffer because the older person ends up ill due to lack of nutrients. It’s estimated that one senior in four doesn’t get enough food to eat. Only 13% of the persons receiving food from HPNAP supported pantries are elderly.
Joyce is a perky 96-year-old who’s lived in Woodstock for years. She has a caregiver every day now but she really can’t go anywhere anymore so the food she receives is important. Whenever we get to her place, the caregiver has her all dressed up to see us. Her feet don’t work anymore but the brain does and she needs the few minutes of socialization as much as the food.
We have one delivery, a Native American woman experiencing mobility problems. Like Joyce she has a walker but life is still difficult. When she sees us coming, she gets behind her walker and struggles out to meet us.
One day she was coming out to meet us as we drove up and I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. Her usual smile was missing. We looked for something to cheer her up. We found it in the meat box. We found a package of ground bison meat. I honestly don’t know where it came from. Nobody had ever seen this item before. Nor have we seen one since. No matter. When Young Hawk saw the bison meat, she smiled. Her struggle became lighter for the moment.
William had a motorized scooter to get around and a walker also. He had lost a leg to cancer and had a prosthesis. William really needed the food delivery…not only for the food but also because of the social aspects of the delivery. We could always tell when he hadn’t had a good week.
Ann, a 90+ year old woman lived alone in her home in the country. She couldn’t drive anymore, so she really depended on the food. Ann’s favorite pastime in the mornings was chopping and arranging her firewood.
Our board voted that we could not deliver food more than 10 miles out from Woodstock. Clearly, we couldn’t serve everyone.
One couple hitch hiked in whenever they could. They were a darling couple, too. She was Elizabeth Taylor beautiful. He had coal black hair, bright black eyes, and Sylvester Stallone features.
He mostly wore a full length coat in the winter over campers clothes. She wore campers clothes as well. Both outfits included practical hiking boots. His jewelry included a knife with a 7″ blade tied to the thigh of one leg.
They lived five or six miles in from Route 28 in the Big Indian area. So…they hiked the five miles on pantry day to Route 28 and then hitched to the pantry.
When we considered that he was terminally ill and she absolutely never opened her mouth, I don’t know how they made it in week after week after week. But they did. They shopped, got what they could carry and headed back out to Route 28 hoping for a ride home.
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman
Food Pantry Blog – Peggy and the Take Outs
“New people somehow suggest to you that your world is really not as narrow as maybe you believed it was. You’re not so limited by your psychological environment as maybe you thought you were.” – Leonard Michaels
The next series of chapters focuses on a very important part of the pantry life which we have not yet touched on: our Take Out Department which served food to homebound residents.
As a pantry, we never planned to deliver food to homebound people in the Woodstock area. But, to make a really bad joke, the building committee of the Woodstock Reformed Church made us do it.
This is the story: Pantries are required to have volunteers available to serve shoppers on an emergency basis if they call and can’t make it to the pantry when it’s open. Well, Good Neighbor Food Pantry volunteers weren’t allowed in the pantry except during select hours on select days. So, we needed an alternative acceptable to the Food Bank. We created a Take Out Department to deliver food to homebound households.
Our Take Out Department became enormously successful. It was also a tremendous amount of work for the volunteers. We began with insufficient structure and a few volunteers lost sight of the guidelines and rules. One volunteer felt that the 10-mile limit included all of her friends living in an area around Route 32 north of Saugerties. She also felt her mother who lived several hours away was on the route and that a three-day supply of food for her mother included everything she could fit into her car on the way up. She was also lax with the monthly reporting.
Peggy Johnson took over the Take Out Department.
Peggy organized all the Take Outs. she called every household monthly to see how things were going. She made great lists of all the foods they would, could, should eat and great lists of all foods they would not, could not, should not eat. Peggy knew her clients better than they knew themselves.
Peggy was strict with the rules. She didn’t have even one client who lived beyond the 10-mile limit imposed by our Board of Directors. Peggy was strict with her volunteers also. She insisted everyone follow the HPNAP guidelines exactly. And…Peggy demanded proper manners in the pantry. One month Peggy dismissed a volunteer on the monthly delivery day. Whew!
We had one young volunteer who was a computer whiz. She really didn’t want to work in the take outs. What she wanted to do was completely computerize our pantry and be some kind of “Jedi” for our lists, etc. Her hope was to computerize our pantry and use this experience to launch other projects for other pantries. (I honestly don’t think she realized how poor pantries really are.)
It was a good idea but never materialized because on one monthly delivery day Peggy caught her comparing tattoos with one of the Hudson Correctional Facility volunteers. Peggy spoke with her and she never saw her again. We never saw her again either.
In our next post, we’ll focus on the volunteers who made the take out department possible.
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco