Innovative Program Helps Food Banks Feed the Hungry During Covid-19

“Our community includes a lot of people in the service industry. With Covid, they either lost their jobs, or their hours were cut so much they didn’t have the financial resources to make ends meet,” says Pastor James Lee, Director of the Heavenly Hands Ministry. “Before Covid, we were serving about 7,500 families a month. Now it’s up to 11,400.” He doesn’t expect those numbers to taper off until the middle of 2021 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, at Good News Church, food boxes are handed out once a month, each containing meat, fresh fruit and vegetables, grains and non-perishables. In April, Kebede says, 150 cars lined up to get the boxes. Now it is up to about 800 cars, with some 400 more boxes delivered directly to apartments for those who don’t have access to transportation, and a tent set up to serve the homeless. “If we had access to more food, there would be a need for it,” Kebede says.

Some 50.4 million people, or 15.6 percent of the U.S. population, will experience food insecurity in 2020, projects the non-profit organization Feeding America. Among children and broken down by states, the projected rates range from 15 percent in North Dakota to 32.3 percent in Louisiana and Nevada. Black families are twice as likely to experience food insecurity as whites. Seventy-six percent of those dying from Covid-19 have an underlying condition, the majority of which are diet-related.

The Rockefeller Foundation is calling for three policy shifts to promote food security across the U.S.: an integrated nutrition security system, reinvigorated regional systems to better balance the nationwide food system, and equitable prosperity through the supply chain.

This is one of CARE’s first U.S.-based programs in its 75-year history. Besides Houston and Louisville, the program is active in three other locations, and expansions are under consideration. “We thought when we started that this would be a two- or three-month intervention,” says Ryan Shepard, Executive Director of the Care Atlanta Global Innovation Hub. “We are now looking at it as a two- or three-year effort.”

Shepard says the crises triggered and exacerbated by the pandemic have shown that “we have a tremendous responsibility to each other if we want to see great, good, or even better days. Healthcare infrastructure, food access, our education system—all these things that we’ve been talking about in silos are merging in ways that are concerning.”

Despite that, he says he remains hopeful. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, so I really do hope we can have a moment of reckoning where we decide to commit to our better angels.”

Becca Willenbrink, 22, graduated from Western Kentucky University in May and had planned to move to Spain and teach before the pandemic. “I didn’t expect to come back to Louisville,” she says. “I have no community here, and the problems with racial injustice—and, related to that, food injustice—are particularly strong.”

She also was hired by Change Today Change Tomorrow, and is grateful not only for the salary, but because the work delivering groceries to West Louisville neighborhoods has made her feel more connected. “This all comes just as I was set to begin my adult, independent life, and it is a genuinely confusing time,” she says. “The work has grounded me and helped me find a community of like-minded people who care about the things I care about.”

Part of what Willenbrink does is provide hot food and hygiene bags to houseless communities through the organization’s Umoja Project. “I recently befriended a woman named Sandy, and it is really fulfilling to get to see her every week,” she says. “Houselessness is another crisis that our country could honestly solve.”

Kebede, too, says Heads UP Houston is grateful that the grant made it possible to hire Hernandez, who is in charge of canned goods. She checks the dates, pulls out expired cans, and gets them ready for boxed deliveries.

Originally from Ixtapa, Guerrero, on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, she echoes Willenbrink in saying the work has made her grow closer to her community. “I want to teach my kids that it is important to help people, even if you don’t know them personally,” she says, “because you never know what your own position will be in the future.”

Pastor Lee agrees that the hard times have brought people closer. “One young lady came in last week and said, ‘Pastor, there is no way I could have made it without you. The only thing I have to offer you is prayer,’” he recalls. “That boosted me. It keeps me running a little bit further and a little bit faster. She understood people need encouragement, and through her tears, she encouraged us.”