Tag: food-pantry

What Food Pantry Should You Donate To?

A colleague recently reached out to me about hosting a food drive. Their organization is ready with a donation barrel, but they wanted a recommendation about whom they should donate to. In writing my response, I realized there were a lot of factors to consider when making this decision.

(This is also the time of the year where many organizations are inspired to host their own food distribution or meal, but that often doesn’t actually help local anti-hunger efforts.) Collecting resources for an experienced organization is much more effective, and easier for everyone.

While every anti-hunger organization needs food right now, it is important to recognize that there are many different types of pantries with different styles. Luckily, there are thousands of diverse organizations out there, and with a little research you can find one that aligns with your values.

How to pick an organization to donate to:

Volunteer: The gold standard for picking your donation recipient is to volunteer more than once, which will help you identify if they are a good fit with your belief system. I recommend more than once because the first time is mostly orientation. The second shift will be when you really start to understand how things work. Spending some time doing on-the-ground service will help you learn what resources are or are not available to inspire your donation drive.

Word of Mouth: If volunteering isn’t an option (many food pantries have full shifts right now because of the holidays, but they are often in great need of volunteers in January, too!) I recommend seeking out ways to connect with a volunteer, shopper, or someone else familiar with the organization. Staff are likely swamped, but other community members may have capacity to share their experience. What do they love about it? What makes it special?

Other factors to consider:

Proximity: There are a lot of different ways to choose a food pantry to support, and proximity is an incredibly valid one. Selecting the food pantry nearest to you is a great idea because you’ll support individuals within your immediate community. More of your neighbors than you realize likely utilize the resource.

Doing an internet search for your nearest food pantry might surprise you- I recently learned that two different churches in my neighborhood also have food pantries that I didn’t previously know about.

Client experience: This is the primary factor that determines the recommendations that I give out. While it’s impossible to really know without having been a client myself, I consider factors like being a grocery-style pantry, what communities they welcome, and how they determine eligibility.

I favor pantries with the fewest eligibility requirements, since it’s impossible (and completely irrelevant) for us for know why someone comes to a food pantry.

For instance, I won’t recommend donating to a pantry that only serves people who already receive benefits like SNAP or WIC, since that excludes a significant number of vulnerable individuals (and that number will soon grow from SNAP cuts.)

There are still many organizations, covertly or not, who remain unsafe spaces for marginalized communities like immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals. I look for organizations who explicitly welcome these communities, because in an increasingly hostile world silence can easily be interpreted as taking the side of the oppressor.

There are many organizations out there serving specific demographics, from veterans, to foster children, to people living with HIV/AIDS, and many more. If there’s a community you feel passionate about supporting, there’s probably an anti-hunger resource or food pantry aligned with your beliefs who needs your help.

It’s also important to consider what type of support you want to offer. If you want to donate to a larger food bank, money is probably more desirable than food, since they have more buying power and less capacity to sort and distribute small-scale donations. However, a food pantry might prefer food donations (please ask!), and have specific requests based on their current inventory, such as canned fruit or soups.

I like to encourage themed food drives which guide donors’ choices and make sorting slightly easier for recipients. Things like baking supplies, soups, or spices and seasonings (my personal favorite) help ensure the recipient organization has enough to distribute to many shoppers, and saves them from the conflicts that can occur with limited high-demand items.

While every anti-hunger organization needs food right now, it’s important to carefully consider where your donation goes. It demonstrates who you think deserves to eat, and who you think doesn’t.

Ensuring your donations go to the pantries who give their guests the most positive, abundant, and dignified experience helps move our world a little closer to the place where everyone has access to those same privileges.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Building an Abundance Mindset in Your Anti-Hunger Team

When we are depleted, it is harder to take care of those around us. It’s difficult to convince our community we have the resources we need to support them when we ourselves don’t believe it.

There is no time or place where this reality is more relevant than right now in our food pantries and banks. Rising numbers of visitors alongside interruptions and cuts to the food supply mean that anti-hunger fighters face increasing burdens with fewer resources.

Last week, I had the ultimate privilege of being part of a webinar panel on building abundance hosted by Katie Martin, the author of Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, alongside food banking expert and consultant Seana Weaver.

We spoke about why the idea of abundance is so important to food pantries, and dug into some of the ways that we can foster that attitude among anti-hunger advocates. Here is the video if you’re interested.

It’s important to remember that abundance means having a lot of something, and that it’s possible to have a lot without having enough. This is an essential duality that food pantries experience every day.

How we think about hunger is one of the most powerful influences on how we fight it. When we focus on what we don’t have, the emphasis falls on maintaining limited resources, often to the detriment of the people we intend to serve. When we adopt an abundant mindset, it empowers us to celebrate what we do have and use it more effectively.

While a future post will discuss what we can do to help food pantry guests feel this sense of abundance, it’s important that we start with staff and volunteers. Convincing this demographic that your food pantry has the resources to thrive means they can more successfully convey it to your community.  

Introducing abundance to staff:

  • Adequate wages and benefits. Too often the nonprofit world expects employees to be martyrs, dedicated to the work regardless of the reward. No matter how we feel about the work, the reality is that we also must pay rent, afford medical bills, buy food, and maintain our vehicles. You’re likely to breed resentment if your focus on abundance is limited to the people you serve.
  • Support: Are there enough staff to do the work? Is it possible for staff to comfortably take a break or lunch? Is there an expectation (spoken or not) that staff should sacrifice to support each other, like not taking days off? While I recognize that few pantries have the resources to add staff, keep in mind that retention is cheaper than regularly hiring and training new individuals.
  • Recognition: Fighting hunger demands an enormous amount of emotional labor. Every day, staff work with people who are struggling with enormous challenges; not just hunger but also housing insecurity, medical debt, caregiving, and all kinds of discrimination. Offering daily support to 40 or 50 different people experiencing some kind of trauma is enormously exhausting. Too often, workplaces don’t recognize that the conversations that go into these interactions are just as difficult and draining as moving thousands of pounds of canned goods.

Demonstrating abundance to volunteers:

  • Celebrate abundance. When a guest leaves the pantry with an abundant amount of food, I’ve often heard volunteers mutter comments about how it’s “too much.” I like to counter this attitude by regularly telling volunteers how excited I am when someone leaves with lots of food, and to envision the excitement and security that the individual must feel when accessing this support. This can gradually help your volunteers transition from the idea that your pantry should give out as little food as possible to maintain supply, and instead to give out as much as is necessary to ensure your community feels supported and nourished.
  • Pick a food item to treat abundantly. Ask your volunteers to act as if they have an unlimited supply to encourage guests to take. It doesn’t have to be a popular food, and it doesn’t have to be consistent (I’ve done this with everything from cranberry sauce to cabbage to veggie chips.) Demonstrating an excess will help volunteers gradually process that their role is to be givers of abundance rather than gatekeepers, while also sharing this attitude with your pantry guests.
  • Don’t put volunteers in enforcement roles. When volunteers are responsible for supervising shoppers, such as telling them where they are allowed to go or how much food they may take, it forces them into a confrontational position focused on scarcity. It’s incredibly difficult to feel positive about the impact they’re making when the focus is on telling people what not to do and what they can’t have. I encourage pantries to have volunteers in monitoring positions, but to get staff when enforcement is needed so that volunteers remain immersed in abundance. This is an increased responsibility for staff- highlighting the need for support and recognition!

Building an abundance mindset is not something that can be achieved overnight. It requires repeated exposure over a long period of time until it is gradually adopted as part of the food pantry culture.

The most important thing to remember about implementing an abundance mindset is that you can make a significant impact simply by adjusting the way you think and talk about hunger. Even if you’re not able to make any changes to systems or structures, considering the attitudes we approach hunger with can have a powerful impact on the experience of everyone within the food pantry community.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Uplifting Dignity Amidst a Hunger Crisis

Being an anti-hunger advocate is exhausting right now. The scale of the need we face as people experiencing hunger go without essential SNAP benefits is astronomical. I’m frightened by the growing needs of my neighbors and the overwhelming but vastly insufficient amount of work demanded of my peers. Even though benefits are in the process of restored, it is hardly the end of rising hunger.

A common theme I’ve recently noticed in the public sphere is the tendency to minimize the severity of hunger. I understand it- the suffering and the ramifications are too great to imagine, so it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Even empathetic analyses are failing to recognize how the loss of SNAP- even temporarily- may be a harbinger of houselessness, dropping out of school, job loss, serious medical consequences, and more.

Hunger has much bigger consequences than just empty bellies.

Hunger is never the only challenge people face, and cutting food resources also cuts away at other essential lifelines.

Although our primary goal is to ensure people can access the food they need with dignity and compassion, it’s important that we remember there is so much more that we aren’t helping with.

To succeed in our mission, we need to actively avoid minimizing the experience of hunger.

Food insecurity is trauma.

It’s true that one or two days of hunger won’t kill you. But the cumulative impact of reoccurring food insecurity has profound, lasting impacts, and we impede our own efforts when we dismiss the hardship of this reality.

How to avoid dismissing the impacts of hunger:

  • Acknowledge when your food supply is inadequate or inappropriate. There are a million valid reasons why you don’t have the food your shoppers want or need, but they don’t need to hear those details. If they can’t get the food they need, at least they can see that anti-hunger advocates understand what they’re facing.

My previous pantry saw a noticeable decrease in conflict when we started listening to the concerns of our shoppers without intent to respond. It’s hard, but it will help your shoppers feel seen, and you’ll hopefully learn something!

  • Actively fight judgements based on appearance. Especially now, as the government shutdown weigh heavily on our economy, people who may have never previously visited a food pantry before are seeking help. They may drive nice cars, live in upscale neighborhoods, and wear new clothes, but none of this influences their need for food and support.
  • As food pantry attendance goes up alongside staff stress and fatigue, fight the tendency to treat shoppers as a number rather than an individual. While the total number of clients served and pounds distributed are important, it’s essential to remember the stories that people bring and the experience they’re having. It’s real. Consider developing a practice of pursuing at least one involved conversation per distribution with a pantry guest and setting aside time to reflect on what you learned.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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What Hunger Looks Like this November

If you don’t work in social services or the anti-hunger sector, it might be easy to underestimate the gravity of the current situation.

It’s hard to articulate the scale of the catastrophe we face.

The government appears to be stalling to avoid using USDA contingency funds that would allow SNAP funding to continue despite the shutdown. It’s unclear if or when those funds will be distributed.

As a result on November 1st, 42 million Americans who depend on SNAP did not receive any money for food.

I’ve heard from several colleagues in the anti-hunger field that it feels a lot like the beginning of the pandemic- that moment when we confronted the reality that our emergency hunger system has nowhere near the capacity to meet the demands we face.

The difference is, in 2020 the federal government mobilized funds to ensure that food banks and pantries could scale up to support their communities. This time, there is no federal sympathy.

It’s clear that while we individually cannot solve hunger, it will be the individual efforts of our communities that help our neighbors get through this.

I find myself regularly dissolving into despair from the amount of suffering I see in the news, but I am buoyed by stories like the successful fundraising of this coffee shop to offer free breakfasts, and by farmers markets around the country changing their policies to maintain access to Double Up Food Bucks without requiring a SNAP match.

One of my favorites stories is from the small town in Eastern Oregon where I briefly lived, where farmers are donating truckloads of potatoes and telling people to “bring a box or plastic laundry basket” to take as much as they can carry. The notices don’t even mention hunger or SNAP- they just instruct the community to show up.  

Efforts like this both impact the lives of people experiencing hunger, but they also offer a concrete way for us to feel powerful, engaged, and connected at a time when it’s too easy to feel helpless and isolated.

Fighting hunger is good for you and your neighbors.

Here’s how you can support your community:

  • Donate. Both funds and food are important. Food banks can often make cheaper purchases in bulk, so funds help them buy more food. For food pantries, it varies. Some may not do much of their own purchasing, in which case donating food is more useful. Check with the organization to see what their specific needs are.

Regarding food donations, consider what other ingredients are necessary to serve it. For example, donating macaroni and cheese requires milk or butter, which consumers may not have. Absolutely donate it- but please just add in other ingredients like canned soups and ready-to-eat meals.

  • Host a food-specific food drive. By choosing a specific item, it’s easier for your community to focus and saves your food bank from having to do intensive sorting. Consider hosting a drive to collect soups, fruit, condiments, cereal, diapers, or other goods.

I’m personally passionate about encouraging donations of seasonings and spices- imagine eating canned beans or veggies without them!

  • Volunteer. Anti-hunger organizations are slammed and need all the help they can get. Conversely, most are not set up to serve thousands of people or support hundreds of volunteers. While volunteers are an essential part of the process, good volunteer management is also intensive and exhausting. Please be kind and empathetic to the staff- there’s a very good chance that they are also SNAP recipients facing food insecurity.
  • Support community efforts. Anti-hunger work doesn’t just have to happen in food banks and pantries. Maybe your neighborhood has a free little pantry you can fill. Perhaps the community garden is organizing donations of produce. Hopefully the school is facilitating a backpack program. If you can’t find something, start something!
  • If you are in a position of financial power, use it! Forgive your tenants’ rent (don’t just defer- you can do better than that.) Give your employees bonuses or raises. How else can you use your resources to ensure your neighbors remain healthy and housed? If you’ve ever complained about crime or houselessness, now is your opportunity to actively prevent it. Hunger-free communities benefit us all.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Building Safe Spaces to Fight Hunger

This upcoming November, recipients of SNAP will not get their benefits because of the ongoing government shutdown. A growing number of Americans are missing their car payments, a key indicator that all is not well with the economy. The threat of the military being deployed to American cities continues to loom.

In addition, growing fears of ICE using increasingly aggressive and brutal tactics makes public spaces less safe.

Despite the obvious and inevitable incoming growth in hunger rates, these conditions create a very real conundrum of rising food insecurity but fewer safe opportunities for people to access food.

Whether or not any of these factors make you personally feel unsafe, it’s important to recognize that they contribute to hunger rates. As anti-hunger advocates, we have an obligation to address it.

It’s easy to feel helpless in this situation, but there are still some very real steps that we can take to combat hunger with dignity and compassion.

Here’s how food pantries can help:

  • Minimize the amount of information you ask of shoppers. Visiting a food pantry is already a vulnerable experience, and many people associate pantries with the government, whether it’s true or not. Asking for no more information than you absolutely need can help shoppers feel more comfortable- and it should be a given that you never share any client information without a warrant.
  • Increase your distribution hours to decrease wait times. Building a system that allows shoppers to get in and out quickly helps people feel more in control of their environment and makes it easier to visit despite busy schedules. Allowing easy flow also makes it more difficult for any enforcement agencies to target your clientele.
  • Mobile markets. While difficult to organize and implement, thoughtful identification of locations for distribution empowers individuals to access food while feeling relatively anonymous. While these events still need to advertise their location, variable times and locations both improve accessibility and help people feel safer from surveillance.
  • Drive-through distribution. During the heart of the pandemic, we learned these are an effective way to get food to lots of people fast. While they don’t regularly allow freedom of choice, enabling people to remain in their cars may be a strong incentive for those who may not feel safe in public spaces.

One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned about fighting hunger is that addressing the biggest, most difficult barriers impacts the greatest amount of people. None of these suggestions are easy or simple to implement. But while they specifically intend to help people feel safe accessing food, they also increase access for individuals with disabilities, a lack of transportation, or schedules that don’t allow for regular pantry visits. Building safe spaces benefits everyone.

By putting in the extra effort to help our most vulnerable community members, we can have the biggest impact on hunger rates, and uplifting the dignity of everyone we serve.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Don’t Rebuild: Let’s Reimagine Fighting Hunger

Right now, my social media feed is nearly exclusively discussions on the reductions being made to anti-hunger resources. With cuts to Farm to School, SNAP, LFPA, TEFAP and more, the industry is shocked, panicked, and legitimately frightened about the future.

For impacts as tangible as cuts to the food supply, it’s incredibly hard not to focus on what we’re losing. Anyone who works in the food justice field knows that we simply can’t support the growing numbers of people facing food insecurity. Food banks and pantries just can’t meet the need as resources and food supplies are decimated.

While it remains essential that we strategize based on our remaining resources, I have been reflecting on how these cuts mean we’re no longer tied to these antihunger programs.

Their effectiveness has been deliberately whittled away, and they’re not doing what we need them to do.

This offers us a moment to fantasize about how we move forward. We have always known that our anti-hunger systems were inadequate, politically motivated, and rarely effective at addressing the root causes of poverty.

Rather than recreating what we had, we face an opportunity to imagine new possibilities.  

Untether yourself for a moment from the constraints of the current political environment, and brainstorm what we can change, rather than what we keep the same, to fight hunger.

My fantasy for achieving a hunger-free future:

What if, instead of restoring all the cut funding relating to food insecurity, we implemented universal healthcare? The average American in 2023 spent over $14,000 on healthcare (although the average in this case is somewhat misleading- some people spent astronomical amounts while others didn’t survive because they had nothing to spend.) In contrast, in 2023 Americans spent on average a little less than $10,000 on food.

Increasing access to healthcare (and hopefully its effectiveness too) and saving Americans this cost would more than cover the cost of food. While this wouldn’t address all the gaps in food access we currently have, it would make a significant impact alongside the added benefit of fostering a healthier population.

What would happen if instead of instead of maintaining WIC, we aggressively implemented programs ensuring that all women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC individuals earned equal wages to white men and had mandated paid sick and maternity leave? Bonus points if we throw in universal free childcare, which has wide-reaching social and economic ramifications.

There’s ample evidence that rectifying the gender pay gap effectively fights poverty, stimulates the economy, and improves retention rates for businesses.

What if we reallocated ALL of the funding our nation is currently putting toward militarizing the police, and established accessible housing for every single American? The U.S. Congress has allocated a little less than $20 billion to fund ICE this year, while in contrast, estimates to end houselessness range from $10-30 billion.

Are these realistic or simple tradeoffs? Absolutely not. Policy is never simple, and we live in difficult times. Making these changes won’t solve anything overnight- we will still need programs actively offering food to people facing insecurity.

But despite this, right now is exactly when anti-hunger and food justice advocates should brainstorm new ways to fight hunger, without restraint. Most advocates will agree that the tools we’ve been using are ineffective and clunky. If they’re being actively dismantled and we’re starting from scratch, we shouldn’t build systems that recreate the inadequacies of the past. We should build new tools that move us towards an anti-poverty future and not just a less food insecure one.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Ignoring Hunger Doesn’t Make it Go Away

The prosperity following World War II helped pull the U.S. from the wreckage of the Great Depression. Mobilization for the war effort produced jobs and industry that countered the unemployment of the previous decade, while years of rationing and disposable incomes prompted an eagerness to indulge.

Thanks to the general increase in prosperity, worries about food insecurity were not a significant part of the 1950s.

While children were admonished to finish what was on their plates while thinking of starving children in other countries, there was little public awareness of hunger in America. There was no data or research being done on the issue which left it mostly invisible.

Policy makers and the average American largely assumed that food insecurity was an occasional event, prompted by a crisis like a job loss or a hurricane. There was little discussion regarding chronic or ongoing food insecurity.

In 1967, Senators Robert Kennedy (NY) and Joseph Clark (PA) made an eye-opening visit to the Mississippi Delta where they witnessed families living in extreme poverty. This prompted a (long overdue) realization about the existence of chronic hunger in the United States.

Fueled by this new interest, in 1968 CBS released the documentary “Hunger in America” which painted a truly gruesome picture of hunger in the U.S. for the general public. It brought chronic food insecurity into the public awareness in a way that it hadn’t been examined previously.

This mobilized the U.S. to action, and over the next several decades prompted an expansion of the Food Stamp Program, the formalization of the National School Lunch Program, the introduction of school breakfasts, and other programs specifically intended to fight hunger.

The U.S made significant progress on fighting hunger thanks to this increased visibility. The public and policy makers demanded an increase in data and the need for effective solutions. Until food insecurity in America received this extra publicity, it was easily ignored and overlooked.

In 1995, the U.S. implemented the American Household Food Insecurity Survey to track hunger rates and provide essential data for helping policy makers evaluate what policies were most effective. This became an essential tool for helping anti-poverty and anti-hunger advocates understand the root causes of hunger and evolve our development of solutions.

Last week, the USDA announced that it was eliminating this survey, stating that it did not provide any useful data.

Without relevant data on food insecurity, it becomes harder to measure the effectiveness of policy. A lack of facts facilitates a transition towards policies built on assumptions and attitudes rather than data. And history has clearly shown us that anti-poverty policies built on assumption tend to be punitive and ineffective, with a goal of punishing rather than uplifting people who need support.

Although food banks and other advocacy organizations will do their best to continue collecting data, they have neither the funds or the capacity to maintain the same scale as the federal government.

Eliminating this survey indicates that the federal government wants hunger to disappear.

This decision should be a signal to all anti-poverty and food justice advocates that cuts to programs are likely only just beginning.

Without accurate hunger rates, it’s easier to make false claims about the economy, quality of life, and satisfaction with leadership. Without data, it grows harder to justify the need for SNAP benefits, food bank funding, school meals, and any other program that supports people experiencing food insecurity. Food banks and pantries can’t replace this essential resource.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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What’s a Free Little Food Pantry?

Recently, one of the largest food pantries in my hometown reported that they’ve seen a significant drop in the number of LatinX and immigrant visitors they serve due to the threat of deportation. In the dystopian reality we’re facing of secret police and public kidnappings, it’s easy to overlook that this doesn’t mean these people are no longer experiencing hunger- it’s that they no longer have safe avenues for access.

It is harder and harder to support people facing food insecurity as our public spaces become less safe.

Early in the pandemic, when food banks and pantries were overwhelmed with more people experiencing hunger than they could ever support, my neighborhood started to see “Free Little Pantries” sprout up. They were small cupboards, or occasionally refrigerators, stocked by community members offering an anonymous way for their neighbors to get free food.

I’ve had a couple conversations recently about the value of these resources, and with public spaces being less safe, it seems like a relevant moment to explore their challenges and benefits.

In theory, free little pantries are amazing. They offer a discreet way for people experiencing hunger to freely take the food they need. Enthusiastic neighbors can fill the pantry with the food they have available, and people can take what they want without supervision or judgement. During the height of the pandemic, they offered a low-contact way to get food, and now they discreetly provide food with less risk of encountering ICE. However, they’re not a simple or easy undertaking.

If you’re thinking about starting or supporting a free little pantry, here are some things to keep in mind:

  • Who will be using this pantry? What are the demographics of your neighborhood? Is it a working-class neighborhood, where there may be residents who just need a little boost now and then? Is it a higher-traffic area, where there may be more people who are unhoused passing through? How will people find out about it? There are various websites where you can list your location, but how many people do you want to know about it?

Free little pantries can be a valuable resource for those who are houseless, but they can also be a source of frustration when they don’t offer anything someone can use without a kitchen.

I’ve heard tragic stories of people experiencing houselessness spending Christmas munching on dry pasta, because that was the only food they could access. It’s important to know the demographics who need the most support.

  • How are you going to stock it? Some people are excited to cook and prep ready-to-eat foods for their fridges, while others are ready to do regular shopping. Some pantries depend on donations, which means they never know what or how much they’ll have. What kinds of food are you hoping to offer? The free little pantry near me usually has egg noodles and off-brand tomato sauce, and the fridge is currently full of local garden excess.

While I respect enthusiasm for cooking meals for free little pantries, I also caution against it. It’s hard to guarantee the safety of these meals unless you’re very carefully supervising your fridge, labeling ingredients, documenting dates, and monitoring temperatures.

  • Are your neighbors supportive of this project? It’s important to think about the level of traffic you’re comfortable with. Do you have a neighbor who will call the police anytime they see a stranger walk by? Are they going to complain about unknown cars passing through, or potential garbage on the ground? A free little pantry can never really be a solo endeavor, and you’re going to need community buy-in.
  • How much time do you want to spend on this project? How often are you able to check it, organize, and clean the space? Depending on the level of traffic, it may need more or less attention to keep it acceptable for users and neighbors.

If you have the energy and enthusiasm, go for it! Free little pantries are a great option for offering food to people experiencing hunger with low barriers and anonymity.

They are a great resource for those who may just need a little boost to make it to the next payday, but it’s important to recognize that they don’t have the capacity to fight ongoing food insecurity. They’re an individual solution to a systemic problem.

If you’re looking for other ways to stay engaged, consider food or fund drives for your local food or pantry (and of course engage in their advocacy efforts). Check with them on what their eligibility requirements are and seek out the organizations who are working hardest to support immigrant and marginalized communities. Consider seeking out backpack programs that send kids home from school with food or volunteer with other community food justice efforts like Portland’s Fruit Tree Project or the Green Bag Food Project.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Keeping Compassion in Anti-Hunger Spaces

I receive an increasing number of messages from people eager to convince me of the prevalence of fraud in emergency food assistance programs (usually in response to this post).

Writers share how a neighbor or relative was excited about receiving help to fill up their refrigerator, and this joy was evidence that they must not really need the food and had committed fraud.

Despite not having any personal knowledge of the recipients’ finances, life situation, or food security, the writers are universally confident that their acquaintance doesn’t need the food and are simply exploiting the system.  

They’re sure the system is broken because people experiencing hunger are happy about having enough to eat.

I don’t bother to even acknowledge these messages anymore. They teach me far more about cultural attitudes about hunger than about any disfunction in food assistance programs, but I continue to be shocked by the cruelty of this attitude. These writers believe their entire community should have less access to food because one person they don’t know anything about had more food than they were comfortable with.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an attitude exclusive to internet lurkers. It’s also an attitude regularly reflected in food pantry volunteers and organizational policies themselves, particularly in how they maintain power dynamics and expect clients to act with humility. This is why recipients of food assistance responding with joy and excitement to a few days of food security is so triggering.

We live in a society that is actively working to disregard the humanity of the people around us by reinforcing systemic oppression. This directly reflects in how we think about, talk about, and fight hunger. Our anti-hunger systems have long sought to control the behavior and the attitudes of people experiencing hunger in a way that demeans rather than uplifts these individuals.

How can food justice advocates bring empathy back into the fight against hunger?

  • Advocate for the humanity of the people you serve. Have conversations about how you don’t want to live in a world where it’s okay to ignore hunger, or to deliberately deprive people of the resources they need to survive. Make people say who they think should starve to death. It’s true this is an aggressive position, and you may lose volunteers or donors. But it’s important to recognize that if individuals believe there are people who don’t deserve to eat, they are not doing your anti-hunger organization any good anyways.
  • Practice self-care. There’s nothing more exhausting than the emotional labor of trying to convince people that they should care about others. I’ve discussed before the work that goes into welcoming nervous clients using stigmatized services, but it’s equally important to recognize that fighting hunger requires engaging with people who advocate for cruelty over compassion.

While arguing with them is rarely productive, anti-hunger advocates are often forced into positions where they must connect professionally. Do what you must do to shake off this ugliness- a primal scream in the walk-in freezer, cuddle your pet, aggressively weed your garden, or eat a bar of fancy chocolate.

There is nothing more important right now than our front-line advocates maintaining their ability to practice compassion and ask it of others.

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The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Don’t Offload Food Waste onto Pantries

The smell of overripe bananas will forever make me nauseous. Our food pantry once had a pallet of bananas donated that the person on the phone promised were completely edible, with “only a little bit of brown.” While that was technically true, the fruit was also so soft I couldn’t pick it up without it disintegrating, and there was no way that I would offer this to my clients.

(If you’re like 99% of my volunteers, I know what you’re thinking and I’m going to stop you right there. Baking banana bread requires flour, sugar, and oil, all of which are incredibly rare at food pantries. It’s also a recipe primarily familiar to Western Europeans, unlike many of our shoppers. It’s not a practical suggestion, and it drives your food pantry staff bonkers.)

I spent the next two days unpacking the bananas from their boxes and tossing them into our compost bin. The smell permeated my hair and clothes, and I regularly had to step outside for fresh air. I wanted to call the donor and yell at them to take this donation back. It was a waste of my time and a test of my patience, as well as a burden to our compost system. But of course, I couldn’t risk jeopardizing the relationship.

As massive federal cuts leave nonprofits scrambling to access resources, anti-hunger organizations are sending out pleas for community food donations. Although vastly inadequate, for many underfunded nonprofits this is their only option for continuing services.

As part of this campaign, organizations are seeking to establish or boost relationships with corporate partners like groceries stores who have the potential to supply larger quantities than individual donors.

When these relationships work, they are a boon for everyone. Businesses get public appreciation for making a donation (and the tax benefits), and food pantries get the food they need to serve their neighbors.

But just as often, these transactions act as a way for businesses to offload their waste disposal.

Too many people still hold the pervasive idea that it’s okay for people living in poverty to eat lower quality food, which justifies them donating foods that no one else wants to eat. I’m sure this banana donor genuinely believed they were helping us since they knew that food pantries were desperate for food, thanks to constant messaging they hear about donations.

Unfortunately, this attitude places recipients in the uncomfortable position of having to either silently accept the donation or risk offending the donor.

Our current nonprofit culture lives in such a scarcity mindset that it has become the norm to accept these donations, even when it brings additional costs for the recipient such as waste disposal and labor.

How can pantries advocate for quality donations?

  • Make expectations clear from the outset. My pantry developed an internal system for evaluating food that we would have done well to share externally. We only distributed food that must last until tomorrow and bring joy to recipients. While soft ripe bananas might still technically be edible, they brought no one joy. Telling donors this at the outset would help them understand what we could and couldn’t accept.
  • Engage in a dialogue with donors about the challenges of receiving food that doesn’t meet your needs. (This has the added benefit of introducing the idea that you don’t just want any foods, but have specific needs for your community.)Before a donation is even made, I like to mention the hardship of receiving food that has to be immediately tossed. Whenever possible, look at the donation before you make a commitment.
  • This demands confident leadership, but don’t be afraid to refuse donations that don’t meet your standards or align with what you were told you were receiving. While you may risk offending or losing a donor, you also set yourself up for a far more productive relationship in the future. They weren’t helping you by donating garbage, so you don’t actually lose anything.
  • Asserting donation expectations also teaches your volunteers and community the standards of your organization. Volunteers often assume that food brought into the pantry has already been determined acceptable, which means it’s okay to distribute to clients. When you don’t allow low-quality food in the door, you teach your team that your clients deserve only the best.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Why Growing Food Doesn’t Protect From Hunger

Americans have an idealized vision of agriculture that celebrates individuals developing an intimate relationship with their land through hard work to provide for their families.

Framed by a backdrop of diverse crops and not quite enough money to make ends meet, the myth of American agriculture recognizes the hardship but also celebrates the purifying effects of physical labor and food production. Farmers are celebrated as the “salt of the earth,” which is a biblical reference for being honest, hardworking, and reliable.

People working in agriculture are regularly lauded as the epitome of rugged individualism and American heroes. But individuals working in agriculture are also one of the most food insecure demographics.

Thanks to a lack of labor protections that results in appallingly low wages, the agricultural sector is highly vulnerable to food insecurity. Many of the people who harvested your food for your recent holiday weekend barbeque likely couldn’t afford it for themselves.

While farm jobs generally do not require an advanced education, this does not justify starvation wages. First, it’s important to remember that this is essential work. If you like to eat, then you need someone to harvest your food.

It’s also important to consider that while it may not require formal education, agricultural labor is hard. It’s physically demanding, often in uncomfortable or dangerous weather conditions, and is time-sensitive (before the crops go bad.)

In addition to inadequate wages and physically stressful work, agricultural jobs by their nature are in less centralized or accessible areas, which means people have to travel further distances to visit grocery stores. Very, very few farms can offer their laborers more than the scraps of their harvest, and even fewer have a diversity of products that might be the origins of a healthy diet.

A discussion of food insecurity amongst farm workers also demands that we talk about immigration policy. Our current agricultural system depends on migrant workers and those who have entered the country without authorization. This is the primary way that businesses can continue paying such inadequate wages– by exploiting a vulnerable workforce who has few other options than acquiescence. The main argument against labor protections is that farms can’t afford to pay better wages- damning evidence of a broken system.

As ICE increasingly harasses and threatens anyone they arbitrarily deem suspect, it becomes less and less safe for anyone to do this work, which is already starting to manifest as labor shortages.  

As it becomes less safe for people to go to work, their risk of hunger increases exponentially.

What can anti-hunger organizations do to fight hunger among farm workers?

  • Increase services in rural and agricultural areas. These are often neglected because organizations prioritize the number of clients served over the need for service, and rural sites likely serve fewer clients even though they have higher rates of hunger. Mobile pantries and markets are hugely valuable resources.
  • Reduce reporting requirements that might scare shoppers away, such as asking for documentation. Even if your organization already serves undocumented individuals, it’s important to recognize that in the current state of fear they may not come unless you are explicit about being a safe space.
  • Research the labor practices of the food coming through your organization. While I fully recognize that few food banks have the capacity to pay more for the produce they buy, we still need to work towards a system that pays people appropriately and that begins with information.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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What’s Important about the Location of Your Food Pantry?

I live in a major city which has a significant houseless population living downtown. Far too often, I hear people complain about the concentration of services for houseless individuals that are also downtown. They advocate for moving these services farther away from the city center to intentionally displace these individuals so that they are less visible.

However, the reality they seek to ignore is that the reason that services are located downtown is because they are easily accessible. People with limited resources can visit shelters, meal sites, and health clinics while using buses and public transportation, libraries, educational opportunities, and engaging with family and friends in a way that isn’t possible by moving services to the suburbs.

This is a very deliberate policy decision on the part of housing advocates that has not been equally applied to anti-hunger efforts. Because food pantries tend to originate in churches and underfunded nonprofits, they often find themselves in whatever physical spaces are available rather than in what would be the most appropriate.

While I’ve previously discussed the importance of the physical accessibility of the building, today I’m reflecting on the considerations that should go into geographic location.

While few anti-hunger organizations have the resources to make deliberate decisions about this, it’s still important to assess how the physical location of your program may influence who does (and doesn’t) use your pantry.

People experiencing hunger come with a wide range of backgrounds, and it’s important that the physical location be widely accessible. That means people can travel there via private car, public transportation, and on foot.

Evaluating your pantry’s location:

Travel by foot

An important consideration regarding walkability is how often people are allowed to visit the pantry. Pantries who only allow shoppers once or twice a month inherently encourage people to take more food, but individuals on foot only take what they can carry, which may leave them hungry before their next visit. Pantries who allow shoppers to visit more often are better suited for foot traffic.

Travel by bus

  • Is the pantry on a bus line? How many transfers might pantry clients make to get home, and how long is the wait for a bus? Traveling on a bus with full bags of groceries is awkward and uncomfortable, so frequent bus service on clean, safe buses is important. It’s also important to consider pantry distribution hours, and whether they align with the bus schedule. While I’ve believe every pantry should offer an weekday evening distribution, it might not make any sense if the buses leave shoppers waiting in the dark for extended periods of time.

Travel by car

  • Does the pantry have dedicated parking? Is there any handicapped parking? While we should all aspire for a world that demands less driving, food pantry clients are not the population to start with. Having easy access for personal vehicles may make it easier for shoppers to take more food which hopefully empowers them to come less often. People with disabilities disproportionately face food insecurity, so it’s important that pantries make parking as easy as possible with room for wheelchair ramps, large vehicles to turn around, and proximity to the pantry.

Proximity

  • Is your pantry located near any other resources? I once worked for a pantry which was located across the street from DHS, who could help individuals sign up for SNAP benefits and then send them over to us, or vice versa. I have also worked in food pantries in schools, which made it simple for families to shop when picking their kids up at the end of the day.

Partnering with other programs your clients utilize can reduce the number of trips they need to make, shrink the time commitment of these errands, and just make it easier to get food when they need it.

While hunger in America is treated as something to be ashamed of and hidden, it’s important that we make it visible. Hunger should make everyone uncomfortable, and we’ll never find a solution by keeping it a secret.

Placing anti-hunger resources in as visible and as accessible locations as possible is a simple place to start.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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What Happens When Emergency Food Runs Out?

Like any other public space, my food pantry regularly encountered people who were challenging to work with. After spending significant effort helping an individual get through their food pantry visit, volunteers regularly asked me why I didn’t just refuse them service.

They questioned whether it was appropriate for me to spend that much time helping someone who was rude, unruly, or struggling with their mental health get through the pantry. Inevitably, the volunteer would point out, “they can always just go somewhere else.”

That’s the assumption that gets us into trouble.

There is no guarantee that someone can find food elsewhere.

Food pantries are often located in inaccessible locations, far from city centers and public transportation. For people without a car or with disabilities, it may not be possible to travel to another pantry. Food pantry hours are also notoriously inconvenient- designed to accommodate the schedules of volunteers rather than the needs of shoppers.

It’s never safe to assume that someone will be able to find food somewhere else.

It’s especially important to consider this as our government debates drastic cuts to SNAP which will cut off this essential resource for people who may have no other options for food access. Food pantries are already facing cuts to their food supply, which means the two main tools we use for fighting hunger are significantly weakened and inadequate for the growing need.

What happens when people can’t access food?

  • Nutritional quality declines. Lower quality foods are cheaper, and people must buy what they can to fill their belly without regard for nutrition. Poor diet leads to poor health, which increases healthcare costs and adds barriers to survival. Without enough money, there are no workarounds. We sometimes joke about this- like how it’s a rite of passage for college students to survive on nothing but ramen, but this hurts everyone.
  • Theft. When people have no other way to access food, they may resort to shoplifting. Getting caught risks a criminal record which increases their barriers to food security. Our society is often eager to demonize people for these types of crimes even though these individuals have few other options. Telling someone to get a job does nothing to help them endure their empty stomach tonight.

Because our society consistently treats hunger as a result of poor decision making, it’s easy to frame the solution as making different choices- maybe people just need to look harder or somewhere else to find food. But what this paradigm fails to consider is that there are not unlimited options for finding food.

It’s very real and very true that people run out of people and places to turn to for help. Especially with recent and impending cuts to emergency food assistance, we can no longer assume that someone will be able to find food when their SNAP is cut and their food pantry emptied.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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The Importance of Understanding Hunger as a Spectrum

When I worked at a food pantry, I regularly heard two different narratives that brought people through our doors. The first was that using food assistance was a familiar or constant part of their survival, and the second was that they never believed in a million years that they would need food assistance.

The number of people coming from each of these backgrounds would ebb and flow based on the economy, reflecting the overall struggle to reconcile rising the cost of living with stagnant incomes. And of course, there were plenty of people who identified somewhere between these two narratives, yet their stories tended to receive less attention.

Right now, food pantries are seeing a significant increase in the number of people needing help who have never before set foot in a food pantry.

While we shouldn’t be surprised that people who previously identified as food secure are seeking out food assistance, it’s unfortunate that our anti-hunger programs are often ill-equipped to serve them.

Americans like to assume that people are poor or not- that there’s no middle ground. But the reality is that most people lie in that middle ground- surviving, but easily challenged by an unexpected expense or rising inflation.

There’s enormous stigma against food assistance in the U.S. which means that making a visit to a food pantry for the first time can feel intimidating, embarrassing, and shameful. How pantries operate and treat their shoppers can help alleviate these feelings or emphasize them.

Food pantries who assume they only serve people who have only known poverty fail their mission and their community. They create spaces that are much less welcoming, often less accessible, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about hunger that work contrary to the mission of ending hunger.

It is essential that organizations start discussing what changing economic conditions do to their clientele and ensure they are well-prepared to serve everyone with abundance and grace.

How food pantries should prepare for shifting demographics:

  • Volunteer training. Volunteers often have assumptions about what people should look like if they visit a food pantry- they shouldn’t drive a nice or clean car, wear cute clothes, buy Starbucks, or have a new phone (this is also where racism often becomes glaringly apparent). I’ve seen volunteer assumptions about a shopper’s appearance directly impact the services they offer, even though none of these are actual indicators that someone doesn’t deserve food assistance (while also raising the fundamental question, who deserves to eat?).
  • Remember that poverty is not a yes/no concept. Poverty for one person looks very different than for another, and there’s no clear defining line between being poor and financially secure. Someone may not feel food insecure until they’ve emptied their bank account, while another may feel driven to stock up long before the cupboards are empty. We do our community a disservice when we try to define or limit food insecurity to a single experience.
  • Ensure systems are simple and accessible for everyone. Especially if your pantry depends on word of mouth, it’s easy to assume that people will be told by friends and families the tricks to shopping, like when to line up or what paperwork to bring or what foods to expect. Make sure that someone who knows nothing about your pantry can also access this information.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Fighting Hunger and Making Food Fun

I have something a little different to share this week. Please enjoy this guest post I wrote for FoodCorps about the transformation my food pantry saw when we eliminated limits on most of our food supply.

As the anti-hunger world faces increasing budget cuts, restrictions, and fears about scarcity, it’s more important than ever that we focus on how we can still uplift abundance to ensure everyone can have fun with what they eat.

Previous Post: Can We Force People to Eat Healthy?

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Can We Force People to Eat Healthy?

For years, there’s been debate in anti-hunger circles about the need to improve the diet and health of people experiencing hunger. Most recently, discussion has revived around adding purchasing restrictions to SNAP to make soda, candy, ice cream, and prepared desserts ineligible for purchase with benefits.

On the surface, it sounds like a great idea. Assuming that people just need to be directed towards healthier options, this would be an efficient policy. Because Americans generally believe that poverty results from making poor choices, it’s easy to accept that people experiencing hunger need help making better choices. We’ve also all been conditioned to believe that people using SNAP are trying to manipulate the system, which makes it easier to accept that they need extra restrictions.

However, this policy proposal does not improve health, recognize current barriers to food security, or respect the dignity of people experiencing hunger. Empowering people to eat healthier benefits everyone, but this policy proposal fails to do so.

There’s no evidence that people who use SNAP have a worse diet than people who don’t.

This should immediately call into question why SNAP has been chosen to be the policy tool for this crusade.

If this policy seeks to reduce junk food consumption, why does it only restrict people receiving benefits? Specifically targeting vulnerable, low-income demographics for a society-wide issue is disingenuous and inequitable.

After working in anti-hunger spaces for nearly fifteen years, I’ve learned from thousands of people seeking food assistance. Overwhelmingly, these individuals demonstrate that they know how to eat healthy.

Ask at any food pantry, and staff will tell you that quality fresh produce is always in highest demand and shortest supply. We see too many food pantry photos of shopping carts loaded with potato chips because that’s all they have- it’s not that shoppers are choosing them over healthier options.

People experiencing hunger know as well as any other demographic what healthy eating looks like.

The barrier isn’t knowledge or choice; it’s access. Fresh foods are more expensive than processed. Critics like to point out that an apple is cheaper than a bag of frozen chicken nuggets, but they ignore the reality that an apple is not a meal. An apple, peanut butter, and fixings for a sandwich on whole wheat bread is significantly more expensive than a bag of frozen chicken nuggets. By calorie, healthy foods are more expensive.

What would these SNAP restrictions achieve?

Since adding restrictions to SNAP do not increase the budget of beneficiaries, eliminating the purchase of certain foods reduces choice. By making unhealthy options inaccessible, it does not make healthy foods more accessible.

SNAP funds are so inadequate that they have always forced people to prioritize the cheapest foods. The choice has never been between a bag of chips or a vegetable stir fry.

This policy intends to assert the idea that people experiencing poverty need the leadership of people who have never been food insecure, which is condescending, paternalistic, and completely ignorant.

It also takes away the chance for recipients to practice self-care through food. Facing the incredible challenges of today’s world, everyone deserves the freedom to buy the foods that make us feel comforted, safe, and nourished, even if they’re not always the healthiest.

If policy makers really cared about the health and diet of SNAP recipients, they would be fighting to increase SNAP benefits. If they really feared the risks that junk food poses to Americans, they’d be working to reduce access for the entire population.

This policy just intends to be cruel towards and already vulnerable population.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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How to Build a Welcoming Food Pantry

I often hear food pantry staff complain that there are neighbors and community members experiencing hunger who simply won’t use their food pantry. Although I hear this less often as food pantries see rising hunger rates, it’s still not unusual for staff and volunteers to recognize specific communities that they simply can’t entice to the pantry.

I regularly hear surprise and confusion at the thought that someone experiencing hunger might not seek out or want their help and resources. Although there are many underlying reasons why people may not attend the food pantry, it usually boils down to not feeling welcome.

Our society’s idea of creating a welcoming atmosphere often stops at colorful murals and smiling volunteers.

This is a great starting point but isn’t likely to attract someone who is already reluctant or uncomfortable about visiting (especially because of systemic/historic barriers).

Food pantry staff and volunteers are usually wealthy, white, English-speaking, cis women who are working high-income jobs or retirees. Few have experienced hunger and often have little exposure to the cultural norms or language of the communities they’re trying to approach. As a result, their efforts at outreach and a welcoming environment can feel awkward, artificial, or fake. No one wants to visit a food pantry just to make the volunteers feel good, but that’s often the expectation these efforts can invoke.

Building a welcoming environment starts with:

  • Advertising pantry services in the language spoken by the community. This should include hiring a translator to read all your marketing materials rather than running it through Google translate. Ideally, it also means having a translator or service on site during distribution hours to explain the process to community members who attend. This makes the pantry infinitely more accessible and less intimidating for people who aren’t familiar with the concept, frightened by the process, or worried about the requirements. One of my favorite local pantries offers a weekly distribution entirely in Spanish.
  • Building community.

Food pantries shouldn’t exist in a bubble.

Send representation to community meetings, local government gatherings, potlucks at neighboring churches, and listen to your community’s needs. You’re far more likely to get honest feedback and build trust while weeding the community garden or picking garbage off the street than interrogating someone across a desk. This can help your organization learn what it can do to offer effective support for your neighbors, which may require changing your current operations.

It’s quite likely that a pantry run by people of predominantly western European backgrounds may not be familiar with the foods that your clients want, and don’t even know what they don’t know about them.

Consider hiring a community chef to do a cooking lesson or taste test for volunteers, staff, and neighbors to learn more. I’ve often seen volunteers throw out foods they aren’t familiar with, which is a direct deterrence to shoppers.

  • Offering flexible systems. Some people are comfortable waiting in long lines, while others may naturally crowd up to the front. Some shoppers might seek extensive guidance and oversight from staff while others prefer to be completely independent. Develop systems that allow for these differences which can be cultural as much as personal preference.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Why Food Pantries Need Reliable Hours

It’s always a treat to leave work early. Who doesn’t love it when your manager decides that you should head home to enjoy some extra hours for yourself?

Everyone I know needs a vacation right now, but there are many workplaces that absolutely cannot change their hours or accommodate extra closures. Social Security offices, the ER, and food pantries are all examples of institutions that need to be reliably open. If they close early or unexpectedly, people lose out on essential or life-saving services.

The challenge is that Social Security and ER are staffed by paid professionals, whereas food pantries are predominantly run by volunteers donating their time. It’s much harder for a manager to stop them from leaving early when they want.

What are the consequences of a food pantry closing early?

In my experience, the shame and stigma of food assistance means that many people postpone visiting a food pantry until the last minute, when their shelves are literally empty and their stomachs grumbling. Our food pantry often saw a high number of first-time clients at the end of the day, possibly for this reason.

When a food pantry closes early, people who were counting on it for dinner that night are deprived of that meal and more. If you showed up for your first ever visit to a closed food pantry, it might also influence your enthusiasm for trying again.

Food pantry hours are often inaccessible. I’ve mentioned this many times before, but food pantry distribution hours usually cater to the schedules of volunteers rather than the needs of their community. Retirees often have very different availability than families facing food insecurity (who are usually working multiple jobs and acting as caregivers) which makes it extra difficult for people to access pantries.

If we want to fight hunger, it’s essential that food pantries offer reliable hours.

To be a useful service for shoppers, they need to know when the food pantry will be open. People will quickly stop coming if they find that it is ever closed when they thought it would be open.

Many people drive significant distances to pantries, and few have the resources to deplete their fuel for an unreliable resource. People experiencing hunger will seek out other pantries, if they have that option, or go hungry if there is nowhere else to access food.

Respecting the time of shoppers should also include minimizing the amount of time spent at the food pantry. An hour-long line indicates that the pantry either has inadequate shopping hours or a weak system of distribution (inducing clients to feel competitive). Examine your food flow policies and expand your hours to reduce the wait time. Long waits in line make food less accessible for seniors, parents, and people with disabilities while increasing tension and stress.

Action points for pantry leadership:

  • Maintain consistent and reliable hours. Posting schedule changes on social media is useful, but many food pantry clients may not use it, and these updates are only functional for the people who read the language that they are written in. Advertise where you will share unexpected closures ahead of time (website? voicemail? a sign on the door?) so that clients know how they can find out about schedule changes due to events like extreme weather.
  • Teach volunteers how important their role is. There is an urgency to this work that may not accompany other volunteer opportunities, and your organization needs to clearly articulate that. Although pantries should be tolerant of unexpected events, set a precedent that volunteers complete their entire shifts and NEVER close the pantry early. Consider implementing repercussions for volunteers who repeatedly no-show or leave early- the rest of your volunteers will thank you!
  • Hire enough staff so that operations and hours can continue normally if someone is sick or on vacation. If your food pantry operations depend on the presence of a specific individual, you are setting yourself up to fail when they inevitably get sick or leave (or get burnt out). Bonus points for paying your staff living wages to increase morale and retention!

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Changing Our Diet Won’t End Hunger

Content warning: discussion of slaughtering animals for meat consumption

I increasingly receive emails from people excited to share the secret to solving hunger- usually advocating for a miracle crop, agricultural practice, or a specific diet. While these conversations are a great opportunity to learn about their passion, ranging from hydroponics to yucca farming, these solutions don’t usually address food insecurity. They may help with sustainability, conservation, or health, but fail to consider the root causes of hunger.

The solution to hunger has very little to do with food.

Here is a recent must-read on the root causes of hunger recently written by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

Hunger is a political rather than agricultural problem. Food access, rather than quantity, is the barrier to a nourished world.

Nevertheless, one of the most common proposals I hear for ending hunger is vegetarianism. Many people argue that the resources it takes to raise livestock would be much more effectively dedicated to other food products. They’re not wrong, but the issue is so much more complicated than that.

I grew up on a small farm that raised sheep and poultry for meat, with the occasional goats as well. My parents dedicated significant effort to enriching our pastures to ensure it made the animals and the land healthier. Most years, we hired a mobile butcher to slaughter our animals on-site to reduce the stress and trauma of traveling. Meat has always been a part of my diet, and I was never sheltered from the realities of raising livestock.

As a result of my background, I believe that it is possible to sustainably and ethically eat animals. Our society would definitely benefit from changing the way we treat animals, but I’ve witnessed how livestock and conservation do not have to be mutually exclusive.

There is no one “best” way to eat.

Food is how we celebrate culture, traditions, show affection, and care for our bodies and I have the greatest respect for people who make the choice to limit or eliminate their consumption of animal products, whatever their reasons.

While there are many compelling reasons for our society to eat less meat, an essential component of food justice is ensuring that people choose what they eat rather than having the decision forced upon them.

Our world would absolutely be healthier, more humane, and more sustainable if we consumed fewer animal products.

But promoting a vegetarian diet as the solution to hunger does not increase access to food- it simply eliminates a source of nutrition that is essential for many people.

Chastising food insecure families for eating meat is no more dignified nor respectful than placing restrictions on what SNAP recipients can spend their benefits on.

Beans and other plant proteins are not a significant food for many cultures (and it’s a personal pet peeve of mine that many food pantries and banks tout offering dry beans as a miracle solution to hunger.)

As SNAP data shows us, we can empower people to eat healthier by increasing their buying power and is more effective than reducing their options.

Food systems are rapidly evolving, and there are many conditions right now that may significantly impact the foods we can regularly access. But it’s essential that in our effort to ensure our neighbors are nourished we not sacrifice their autonomy and power of choice.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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The Best Part of Using a Food Pantry

I recently was chatting with a farmer who sells their produce at a nearby farmers market, and I mentioned that my professional experience lies primarily in food pantries, and they had so much to say. This farmer shared that when they first moved to Oregon, they depended upon a food pantry and clothing closet. I wasn’t sure what they were going to say next, because it is a negative experience for many.

However, this person absolutely gushed about what a positive experience they had. They visited a grocery style pantry, which gave them the autonomy to make their own food choices, and they said their regular visits were the most respectful, dignified, and compassionate experiences they could have imagined. Years later, their farm still makes regular donations of fresh produce to that pantry.

I don’t hear a lot of these stories. While there are plenty of wonderful food pantries doing incredible work, there are also lots of food pantries reinforcing the narrative that people experiencing hunger are there because of personal failures, bad judgment, or a lack of responsibility. Even pantries with friendly volunteers and a healthy food supply can foster systems and attitudes that still leave their shoppers feeling humiliated or ashamed.

Unfortunately, eliminating these judgements in food pantries depends upon establishing new foundational attitudes rather than just increasing the budget or building capacity.

It’s not something that we can fix with a grant, a handbook, or a webinar training series. This is a reflection of much deeper assumptions that our society holds about poverty, hunger, and responsibility to one another, and it’s much harder to change.

This farmer I spoke to didn’t mention anything about the quality or the quantity of food they received. They didn’t even talk about the line or limits on food supply. Instead, they talked about how the food pantry made them feel. They felt respected, seen, and dignified.

While food is obviously an important component of the pantry experience, this reminds me that even pantries without enough food or those who are unable to access culturally or nutritionally specific options can still make a lasting, positive impact on the individuals they serve.

What are the foundational attitudes for fostering a positive food pantry experience?

  • Everyone deserves to eat without qualifiers, conditions, or exception. It’s important to recognize that if someone doesn’t get food at your food pantry, they might not eat at all. That is not okay. People who have a new iPhone deserve to eat. Immigrants and refugees deserve to eat. People with strict preferences and nutritional limitations deserve to eat. People with visible and invisible disabilities deserve to eat. The community can tell whether your team believes this or not, in how policies are implemented, clients are treated, and services are advertised.

Even if food pantries don’t have everything someone needs, they can still practice compassion by respecting their humanity and need for nourishment. If you’ve ever heard a volunteer question whether someone deserves to visit your food pantry, then you have work to do.

You are the best expert on the food your body needs to thrive. Why would a food pantry client be any different?

  • Treat pantry clients as equals. It’s far too easy when dispensing charity for organizations to demand submission from program recipients, which can manifest as strict rules about waiting in line, nitpicking about paperwork, or checking shopping bags to ensure limits were followed. There are ways to enforce pantry policies without aggressively asserting the power imbalance of using a food pantry. Start by discussing the power disparities, with clients if you can; they probably have a very different perspective than staff and volunteers. Welcome clients to the volunteer team, and take seriously what they share about their own experience.
  • Dignity. Food pantry clients don’t want pity, or condescension, or judgement at all (just like anyone else!) As the need goes up and pantries serve increasing numbers of clients, it can be hard to hold onto the reality that every one of those clients is a human over whom the pantry has significant power. However, focusing on scaling up and efficiency adds very little to a positive food pantry experience.

Even though these are foundational attitudes, they aren’t impossible to introduce to a pantry. Success depends on consistency and exposure, and leadership that is eager to embrace food justice and human dignity.  Building these ideas into your mission, values, and strategic plan is the best way to demonstrate your commitment to the community.

Nonprofits are overwhelmed by need and rightly panicked about funding. But we need to focus on the reality that the most important part of using a food pantry; the piece which clients will remember and share with their neighbors, has little to do with the food they got and everything to do with how their visit made them feel.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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