A week at a rural food delivery site

A few weeks ago, I spent several days in Crescent City, California (population 6,673) as part of a service project with an organization called Sierra Service Project.  

My assignment (and that of the Sacramento youth I was working with) was to help paint the exterior of the Family Resource Center of the Redwoods, which is centrally located in the small, coastal city.  

The school district truck arrived at about 9:45 each morning to 
drop off several coolers full of bagged, single-serve meals

When we arrived late morning on Tuesday August 9, the building was thrumming with activity, mostly thanks to it being a summer food distribution center.  Cars were pulling up, kids or parents jumping out, and coming to collect individual bags of food--typically some milk, an apple or some apple sauce, some source of protein like a PBJ sandwich or a slider-size sandwich with ham and cheese.  

That morning, I watched as a pair of kids showed up on foot asking, "can we have ten?"  Another, hopping out of his parent's car asked, "Do you have six?"  No one was turned away, and all, including adults who came to the table, were given as many as they requested.  Indeed, we were there on the last day of the summer meal program, August 12, when the man delivering the lunches (apparently prepared by the school district and delivered in a school district truck) instructed the women doing the distribution, "we don't want any of these back."  So they gave two lunches for every one anyone requested.  On prior days, extras were put in the refrigerator at the center so they could be handed out to late comers or on subsequent days if the supply of about 100-120 a day ran short.  

The whole operation was very positive. Indeed, everything going on the Resources Center was positive, and I hope to write another post about the facilities and services, including a food pantry, at a later date.  For now, I'm just going to include this photo of new backpacks the center was preparing to distribute the next week. 

Meanwhile, I was reminded of my time hanging out at the Family Resource Center of the Redwoods this past week when I saw this NBC story out of Missouri about that state's decision not to allow "grab and go" delivery of the summer lunches. Instead, the state requires students to sit at the distribution center to eat the meals.  Missouri is the only state to make this decision.  In the past few years, "non-congregate feeding" had been allowed because of the pandemic.  

According to Sarah Walker, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services’ bureau chief of community food and nutrition assistance, "making sure to-go meals were going to the right place was another concern."

It’s very difficult to maintain program integrity when the program is not operating under normal circumstances. If the children aren’t there, you can’t always guarantee those kids are the ones getting the meals — as opposed to sitting on-site eating, you can assure that it’s the child themselves getting the meal.

Vehicles coming and going
from the Resource Center
to collect free grab-and-go lunches

And here's some information from the story on the impact that Missouri decision has had across the state, including in rural-ish places like Neosho (population 12,590)and Nevada (population 8,212):

At the Tri-State Family YMCA in Neosho, staff distributed about 9,800 meals a week last summer. That fell to just over 300 a week, a 97% drop, without the waiver extension, CEO Benjamin Coffey said.

Osage Prairie YMCA in Nevada, Missouri, went from serving 2,400 kids a week last summer to about 200 kids a week, a nearly 92% drop, CEO Jeffrey Snyder said. The drop in meals is even steeper, he said, because last summer, families received multiple grab-and-go meals at once.

These numbers likely reflect a lack of access to meals among families, not a lack of need, anti-hunger advocates say, warning that Missouri is a case study in what could happen for the rest of the country next summer.

The No Kid Hungry campaign estimates that before the pandemic, 6 out of 7 kids who may have needed summer meals were not getting them, said Lisa Davis, a senior vice president of the program at Share Our Strength, a nonprofit organization working to end hunger and poverty.

On a related note, here's a 2014 post about the creative means being used to feed rural Kentucky kids, given that they are scattered across the countryside.  And that reminds me that we saw a number of food distribution locations around Crescent City, including one at the middle school that was a relatively short distance from the Family Resource Center.  Bottom line:  no kid in Crescent City had to walk too far to get lunch this summer--and all could take them home to eat.  That's surely a good thing, though I suspect kids living in outlying areas of the county, like Gasquet, Klamath and Smith River, may not have had such easy access, though lunches were being distributed in those farther flung parts of Del Norte County, too.