October 26, 2009

Food-Pantry System In Need of Help Itself

By Alfred Lubrano

Inquirer Staff Writer

MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer Steveanna Wynn, executive director of the SHARE Food Program, checks food in a freezer. Until new systems are in place, the area’s pantries will continue to be operated “by little old ladies in sneakers,” she said.

Many of the hungry in this area are fed by elderly women with Jesus in their hearts and comfortable shoes on their feet.

The great surprise of the emergency food network - a system of (depending on the count) 500 to 900 pantries in the city, its suburbs, and South Jersey - is that much of it rests on the able shoulders of a feisty corps of volunteers born before television. They take their marching orders from Christ's teachings to aid the poor.

"They're precious, and if Philadelphia didn't have them, this city would be a disaster," said Steveanna Wynn, executive director of the SHARE Food Program, which supplies city pantries with food.

But lately the landscape of charitable feeding is changing. Depending on the pantry, the clientele has grown between 30 percent and 70 percent in the last economically tough year, antihunger advocates report. And almost half the pantries say they don't get enough food to meet the demand.

What began as a church-based, stopgap effort to help strapped families has morphed into an informal system that many depend on for food.

And now that system - a venerable but rickety patchwork of far-flung pantries run mostly by old people - could itself use some help.

"These pantry people are heroes and saints, but they are being taxed beyond their physical capacity," said Bill Clark, who runs Philabundance, the hunger-relief agency that distributed around 17 million pounds of food to pantries in fiscal 2009, much of it donated by corporations and individuals.

Advocates also worry about a problem that's existed since pantries began opening in the early 1970s: They have sprung up haphazardly, leaving some areas of the city with redundant food distribution and others with none at all.

That's why pantries have to better coordinate and fortify their efforts, advocates say. Both Philabundance and the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger are working toward that end.

But change can be slow when food is handed out, bag by bag, by a proud, computer-averse population of micromanagers who aren't grooming successors even as "their bones are cracking," said Derek Felton, a pantry coordinator and staffer of the coalition, an advocacy nonprofit.

"You've got to start thinking differently," Felton told a gathering last week of "hunger fighters," as he calls the sisterhood (mostly) of the pantries. "If something were to happen to you, do you have someone to take your place? How are we going to run programs in the future?"

It's a valid question. In Montgomery County recently, four elderly cupboard managers developed dementia and could no longer stay open, said Patrick Druhan of the county's Community Action Development Commission.

"Hopefully, baby boomers will start volunteering to take the place of those born in the 1920s and '30s," he said.

Until they do, said many of the pantry women at the meeting, they will be willing to undergo training and do what it takes to improve the food-delivery system.

"I will work to open every possible door to get people fed," said the Rev. Gloria Turner, 79, who runs the pantry at Christ Deliverance Center Church in West Philadelphia.

In the complex and kinetic world of charitable feeding, tons of food from the federal government, corporations, and individuals flow into the area, along with streams of money, including $4 million annually from the state for Philadelphia programs.

In Philadelphia, U.S.-supplied food climbed from 170,000 pounds in August 2008 to 425,000 pounds this August, thanks to the federal stimulus, said Wynn, who coordinates federal food and state funding for city pantries. But advocates don't know how long the stimulus help will last.

The food and money are divided among SHARE, Philabundance, and the city's Office of Supportive Housing. Philabundance serves the city and nine nearby counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Those agencies in turn supply shelters, soup kitchens, and pantries.

At the very end of the pipeline, where food is placed in the hands of people who would go hungry without it, are people like Linese Marvin, 84, who runs the Chapel of Annunciation food pantry in Lawnside, Camden County.

"I'm as old as dirt," Marvin said. "I've been running my pantry for 22 years."

Asked whether younger people had stepped up to help feed the hungry, she scoffed.

"Nobody wants to be bothered," she said.

Erskine Dale, 72, who runs the pantry at St. Philip's Evangelical Lutheran Church in West Philadelphia, agreed:

"Kids don't feel they should help unless they're paid."

The most effective antihunger program in America is the federal food-stamp program, which allows people to obtain food from grocery stores. Overall, food stamps provide 10 times the benefits of the entire national network of food banks and pantries, Clark said. Pantries were meant to be only for emergencies, said Carey Morgan, who directs the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger.

But studies show that food stamps and other aid haven't slaked hunger in America. People go to pantries when the other programs run out.

Generally, clients of a pantry (or food cupboard) are given enough food to last a family three days. Many are prohibited from visiting the same pantry more than once a month.

"It takes a lot of courage to stand in a food-pantry line," said Val Traore, chief executive officer of the Food Bank of South Jersey in Pennsauken, which supplies food to 215 cupboards. "Instead of chastising those who go from pantry to pantry, we need to talk to them to see if we can help them with more government assistance."

To improve the pantry system, Philabundance is creating a first-of-its-kind Community Food Center, to open Nov. 10 in the basement of the Lillian Marrero Branch of the Philadelphia Free Library at 601 W. Lehigh Ave.

People will be able to pick from available items rather than take a prepared box or bag of food. This offers clients more choice, and replicates an experience that is less like charity and more like shopping, "helping to foster a sense of dignity," agency spokeswoman Marlo DelSordo said. If the center succeeds, Philabundance

plans to create more like it.

Philabundance is also trying to organize pantries based on neighborhood poverty so food supplies equal need. Using formulas based on census figures, Philabundance will divide the area into "hunger catchment zones."

The Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger is working with corporate and nonprofit partners to bring more funding, food, and training to pantry managers.

It's all new, so it's hard to know how the changes will work.

Last week, at what may have been a first-ever meeting of pantry managers, Felton laid out a five-month schedule to train managers how to be more efficient, work together, and find ways to get more food into their neighborhoods.

Until new systems are in place, however, the pantries will continue to be operated, as Wynn of SHARE said, "by little old ladies in sneakers," much like Doris Mack, 74, who runs the cupboard at Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in North Philadelphia.

"God gives me the whirlwind strength to take care of the needy," Mack said. "I just get on out there and do it."

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