Food Banks Work with USDA on Tornado Relief

Food banks traditionally have operated under the premise of providing temporary food assistance to low-income and working poor families. The economic crisis, which started in 2007, caused a significant increase in families and individuals seeking food assistance from job loss and foreclosure. Food pantries served by Harvesters, the Kansas City area food bank, saw a 40% increase in food distribution.

This dire situation has evolved into a chronic condition with as much as 25% of people in communities seeking food assistance from various sources like pantries, soup kitchens, and Food Stamps/SNAP benefits. The economic crisis has shifted the need from extremely poor to working poor people.

If a chronic condition of hunger in the U.S. is not enough to convince people to change their perception of the growing need for food assistance, then a devastating tornado season may help people understand the need for government assistance.

A recent account by a USDA public relations worker shared how public institutions like USDA work with private, non-profit food banks near disaster areas to provide food assistance.
TEFAP and USDA Foods are a big help to food banks and other organizations that play an integral role in disaster recovery. The Northern Alabama Food Bank alone has already distributed just over 58,000 pounds of their existing USDA Foods to disaster congregate feeding sites across the northern part of the state.

The food bank director at one location in West Alabama became visibly emotional when talking to Arnette about all that USDA Foods do for the food banks. In Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., a cafeteria manager explained that her school, which had been set up as a Red Cross shelter and congregate feeding site for the surrounding area, had used USDA Foods from their existing USDA Food Schools/Child Nutrition Program to feed disaster victims a hot meal.
What's troubling is that Jasper County, where Joplin resides, already had a "very high" food uncertainty and poverty level, but without an adequate response from either public or private food assistance outlets, as measured by the 2010 Missouri Hunger Atlas (33 pages, Adobe PDF format).

The small food bank in southwest Missouri was already underequipped to handle the disaster, which is why Harvesters, a food bank located in Kansas City 100 miles north of Joplin, is planning to receive as many as 30 truckloads of food to distribute for disaster relief.

The tornado may very well increase the level of poverty in this area of Missouri, but one homeless group from Kentucky showed how poor people can support each other (see video), along with assistance from public and non-profit sources.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Community Media: Serving More Than a Geographic Region

Community media outlets like KKFI 90.1 FM in Kansas City have thrived for decades, maintaining a well-established broadcast model: high-quality studio sound broadcast to a wide geographic area serving the "community." Non-profit community radio station like KKFI, along with college radio and small commercial radio stations keep costs low by renting small studios and operating with few paid employees. These stations attract small audiences but differentiate themselves by focusing on community issues, music and culture. This focus is what defines community media, along with -- in the case of community radio -- maintaining cooperative ownership, not corporate ownership. Community radio operators always knew that "community" was more than a geographic region; it was the various cultural, ethnic, social and artistic communities for which locally-produced radio shows target. KKFI has local radio shows by or directed to African-Americans, Mexican-Americans and immigrant
Read more

Proposed Cuts to Food Assistance Point to a “Perform Storm”

Image
During a workshop at a food bank conference held October 3-5, 2011 in Chicago, David Lee, Director of Government Relations and Advocacy with Feeding America , acknowledged a “perfect storm” is brewing that could have a devastating impact on poor and working families. He was referring to the combination of continued, high unemployment, a significant increase in the need for food assistance, and proposed cuts in Federal support for food assistance programs. David Lee (photo: Feeding America) The proposed cuts to TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program) in the agriculture appropriations bill for FY2012, which starts October 1,  represent a 43% reduction from the previous year. “This is terrifying stuff,” mentioned Lee . The proposed House of Representatives version of the 2012 Farm Bill “slashed nutrition” by 20%,  he said, adding that this includes a “terrible, terrible cut to WIC,” the popular program available to lower-income pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and child
Read more

Google Fiber Experiment in KCK: How will the project impact the "digital divide?"

Image
The selection of Kansas City, Kansas as the area to build a high-speed network has been widely celebrated in this area, yet raises questions about how it will address a "digital divide" that limits residents' affordable access to the Internet. photo from the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program site depicting a training class. Several news reports by local and national media outlets reinforced the importance to the local economy and development, like the March 30, 2011 editorial in the Kansas City Star , "Believe it: This is a big deal in an era when Internet speed is key to productivity in business, medicine and education." While the Star cheers the announcement another report a day before and one by Mary Sanchez described the demise of a statewide education network that benefited 400 Kansas schools. These two merging activities show the risk to lack of planning or oversight to technology: the expansion of the digital divide for low-income an
Read more