2008 Holiday Season

There have been numerous articles in the media and I have been talking a lot these past few months about the declining donations of food from manufacturers as a result of the recession. The federal government is searching for ways to bail out banks, car companies and even State governments faced with deficits. All the while, layoffs are reaching 50 year highs moving more people down the economic ladder instead of up. 2008 is certainly going out in a less than cheerful manner and I suspect many will grudgingly welcome 2009 on New Year’s Day since the projections are that things will only get worse.
Here along the Gulf Coast we do have some positives we can look at instead of always focusing on the negatives in the gloomy economy. The weather has been warmer than usual this fall so we’ve barely needed our heaters, lower gas bills in spite of rate increases for natural gas. Home prices never soared into that stratosphere, (except those condos on the beach) so we don’t see them falling like other places, fewer homes in which people owe more than they are worth. Even if slowed by the economic decline, the German steel plant being constructed and military ship construction will help replace jobs being lost as long as people are willing to retrain. I think many here will look at 2009 with the idea that they want it to come quickly so we can move past this down turn and get on with moving up the economic ladder.
So how does all this relate to the Food Bank and our mission of helping people? Well, 2008 has been a tough year. We’ve had a lot of media attention which has kept our phones busy with people seeking to find help. We’ve had a big decline in donated shelf stable food from national manufacturers which has caused us to reach out farther away for donations and pay higher freight costs to get it here. We’ve also had to change our expectations about national donations and shift to a stronger focus on local support through a store level pick-up effort. Store level pick-up is much harder and more expensive. Instead of 40,000 pounds arriving via tractor trailer in cases on shrink wrapped pallets, our drivers must make 70 to 80 stops at individual stores to pick-up 500 or 600 pounds of food of various types. That means this year we’ve spent a lot more money getting the same amount of donated food we got in 2007 and the warehouse staff and volunteers worked a lot harder as well.
People in the community are helping. We’ve had more food drives than ever thanks to concern from individuals, social groups and businesses. We’ve had a lot of media coverage with TV, radio and newspaper reporters taking an interest in learning about the challenges of helping people when times turn tough. And, thank goodness, individuals are helping with cash donations since many of the foundations who often provide support to non-profit organizations have seen revenue from their invested funds evaporate this year. As I look at 2009, I see a year that is going to continue to require growth of our store level donation effort and tightening of the budget belt to squeeze the most help we can provide as more families move down the economic ladder, hanging on until the economy turns around.

Response to Gustav

It is now September 3rd. Gustav ruined Labor Day for most of the people along the coast, but for most of us it was just a windy, rainy day. Our warehouse distributed supplies to four Red Cross shelters opened in Mobile County for people living near the coast and people driving in from Mississippi or Louisiana. As it turned out, most kept going north or east after they passed Mobile, driving into northern Alabama or eastern Florida in case the storm made a last minute turn. Tuesday there was heavy traffic on the interstates heading south and west as people started to head home.
It appears that our primary support will be in the same areas of western coastal Mississippi hurt by Hurricane Katrina. We’ve received a load of food supplies from the Food Bank in Waterloo, Iowa that were left after the spring flooding they worked through. We’ll also be getting a load of cleaning supplies the end of this week and perhaps another load or two of food supplies next week. Our Emergency Pantry sites in Hancock, Harrison and Pearl River Counties have all checked in and are providing reports of light demand but low food supplies. They also expect demand to increase in two or three days because most people have not yet returned. We’ll be listening in on disaster related conference calls to identify the areas with the most need and try and supply the related pantries with food and cleaning supplies Friday so they are ready to help people over the weekend.
So far the impact of Gustav in our Coastal service area looks on the level of Hurricane Dennis which struck the west Florida area about six weeks before Hurricane Katrina. That operation involved distribution of about 200,000 pounds of food and cleaning products over a period of three weeks and cost about $30,000 in operation expenses. What we can expect to see is some neighborhoods suffering from water damage in virtually all homes and without power for a week or longer, while neighborhoods within sight have almost no damage and have power restored in several days. Many of the poorest families will have access to stores that are open but will be short on money. This makes the food and cleaning supplies distributed by the small local church pantries and non-profit organizations very important since return of public services usually triggers the pull-out of Red Cross feeding vehicles. This will be especially true now as Red Cross will have to plan on shuffling assets to be ready for the Atlantic storms threatening other coastal areas 500 to 1,000 miles away.

September 2008 - As Gustav Approaches

I am writing the September blog a few days early since we’ve got the Labor Day weekend coming up. Gustav is moving toward the Gulf of Mexico and seriously threatens to wreak havoc on some portion of the Gulf Coast early next week. What it means for staff at the Bay Area Food Bank, as well as those at the food banks in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston and farther west, is a frantic effort to get our warehouses organized to jump into action as soon as Gustav makes its eventual landfall known. It also means staff members will be participating in conference calls through the weekend with State and Local Emergency Management networks to continue to plan for direct relief, should the storm impact locally, or support to our neighbors should the storm make landfall outside our service area.
While the storm tracks are very sketchy at this point, it looks like our warehouse, (and my house!) are at the eastern edge of the probable path. But, our service area stretches another 100 miles west, which makes it much more likely winds will impact portions of our area and thousands of people will be on the roads moving out of the strike zone. I’ve been exchanging warehouse status reports, contact numbers and plans with the directors of the other coastal food banks as well as the staff in the national office so everyone can be as ready as possible. Meanwhile, the staff has been busy distributing shelter supplies, topping off the tanks on all vehicles, clearing space for the arrival of emergency supplies and going through checklists to ensure we leave the warehouse Friday afternoon ready to jump into action once the storm passes, probably Tuesday.
The threat of a storm causes financial loss even if there is no direct damage to property and that’s one of the challenges we always face following a storm. Thousands of hourly workers will be forced to pack their family in a car, travel 300 or 400 miles inland and spend three or four days away waiting to return. Not only does this mean lost wages, it means hundreds of dollars for meals, gas and lodging. Evacuation for a storm can easily cost $500 at the same time a working couple loses $500 in wages. For a great number of people, this places them in tough financial straights and in the coming weeks we can expect the volume of requests for food from the church pantries that form the bedrock of support to increase.
Next week, you can expect an update telling you what Gustav has meant to us here along the Central Gulf Coast. It may find us busy serving local citizens. We may have staff shifted to a neighboring food bank. Or, we may all be happily poking fun at weather forecasters for missing the mark after a minor storm comes quietly ashore. We’re planning for the worst but hoping for the best.

August 2008

In past writings, I have mentioned the importance of the Farm Bill to distribution throughout our Central Gulf Coast service area. I’ve also mentioned our serious shortage of food due to a reduction of national donations, probably as a result of the declining economy, (is it a recession yet?). Two weeks ago, staff members from the Alabama Food Banks met with the State’s food coordinator and spent over an hour discussing the impact of the Farm Bill’s $50 million in additional food purchases for FY2008. Donny Cooper and his staff in Montgomery have used Alabama’s funds to boost Alabama commodities to 100 truck loads of a great mix of food that will begin arriving in September and end in December. That equates to 800,000 pounds of food coming into the Bay Area Food Bank, about a 400,000 pound increase over what we’ve been seeing. Although the final details are not known, we can expect a similar ratio of increase for our Florida commodities program, equal to about 50,000 additional pounds per month. This will finally boost distribution to a level between 900,000 and 950,000 pounds per month as long as we can keep our donated food sources sending items at the rate we have seen thus far this year. The timing could not have been better. In July we distributed over 750,000 pounds of food,
but only received 525,000 pounds, a situation that would have meant serious shortages if it had continued more than 60 days.
Our summer lunch program for children ended on July 31st. This year we supported children at 29 sites in Mississippi and Alabama serving thousands of breakfasts, lunches and snacks. It provided a great shake-out of our kitchen as a high-production preparation site and helped us understand how to keep food safe when transporting it up to 100 miles to our rural sites. This fall we will be using grant funds to hire a chef to help us learn how to use the kitchen for enhanced snack programs and help educate seniors and children on preparing healthy foods.
Hurricane Season has been gentle to the Central Gulf Coast thus far, but storm systems are beginning to form off Africa and march across the central Atlantic. The next 6 weeks are traditionally the most intense for storms so we’ll be keeping a watchful eye while we hope that Dolly was the one storm predicted to touch the US Coastline this year. This past month, I completed training in disaster response provided by America’s Second Harvest along with Marcus Ditty, our Florida Branch Manager. The workshops were funded by Dunkin Donuts and were designed to help train a cadre of people from member food banks who will respond to assist staffs in any location a disaster overwhelms local capacity.
We’ll have staff busy training on the School Year At-Risk snack program with the Mississippi and Alabama Departments of Education this month. Staff members will be attending the Operations and Food Conference in Chicago learning about trends in food donations as well as upgrading food safety standards. And, we’ll be continuing to increase our work with individual Sam’s Clubs, Super Target and Publix Grocery stores as we continue to boost local donations.

June update 2008

The Farm Bill has passed! After months of delay and a presidential veto there is finally a bill with enough funding in place to start increasing the flow of food back to Food Banks and Pantries towards the levels we saw five years ago before inflation ate away at the funds. The new bill has a provision to adjust funding based on price increases so we hope to see a stable volume of food over the five years covered by the bill. It could not come at a more important time, with fuel prices continuing to go up and food prices following closely behind. We hope to see increased shipments into the warehouse within the next 60 days as state administrators receive funding allocations and order food. It is particularly important to us because our monthly total of inbound food remains about 100,000 pounds behind our goal with requests for support up about 15%, meaning we need about 150,000 pounds more each month than we have been getting. Our staff has significantly increased their contact with local grocers to increase local donations but local donations alone will not solve the problem.

Our summer lunch program for children started on June 2^nd using food prepared in our new kitchen facility following a ribbon cutting ceremony on May 29^th. Congressman Jo Bonner helped cut the ribbon and spoke of the importance of the kitchen in feeding children from financially strapped families as well as the potential role of producing thousands of meals daily for the community following any future severe storm along the central gulf coast. The kitchen will be supporting 25 lunch sites serving free lunches to as many as 1,800 children under the federal Summer Lunch Program. We’ve hired 8 high school students and two school cafeteria supervisors for the effort as well as four drivers to delivery the lunches each day. I see the kitchen as a real win-win-win. We have an asset that supports youth programs year round, is instantly available following disaster and provides work experience to teenagers.

Hurricane Season began on June 1^st which is the trigger for our staff to update phone rosters, check our emergency generator, review safety procedures and cross our fingers that we won’t need to make use of any of the preparations! For those who don’t live on the gulf coast consider this, the water temperature on the Alabama gulf coast this morning was 86 degrees. That’s higher than usual thanks to a hot start to the season and water temperature has a big impact on the strength of storms. I’ve got my fingers crossed hoping for a cooling trend later in the month before any big tropical weather patterns start to work into the Caribbean.

June will not be a lazy month for us. America’s Second Harvest has made a decision to change their name and brand in an effort to be more visible to the general public. Three of our staff will be attending a conference in Chicago to understand the transition. Others will be attending training as volunteers for the network’s disaster response teams. And, all of us will be checking records and processes in preparation for our America’s Second Harvest compliance audit, conducted every two years and designed to ensure we’re managing food donations within the guidelines of the Network as well as government.

May 2008 Update

I was looking forward to talking about the passage of the Farm Bill for this month’s blog so I kept holding back on writing it. Well, it is now Memorial Day weekend and the Farm Bill has passed, kind of….The House and Senate pounded out an agreement, got enough votes in both houses to override a veto, the president Vetoed the bill as expected and then, in the process of overriding the Veto, they discovered an incomplete bill was voted on! The process has to be fixed by a new set of votes, a new veto and then a set of votes to override the veto. If congress was like the guy who fixes your car and forgets to put the tire on, it would stay until the work was done. But, short of a national emergency, government doesn’t work like that. Government is in recess for the Holiday so it will probably be two more weeks before the final bill becomes law and the increased volume of food we’ve been hoping for will begin flowing our way. Two weeks delay means another 50,000 pounds of commodities we won’t have available to distribute in spite of a drastically increased need in the communities we serve. If these were normal times human error of this sort would not have had such a significant impact. Because the Farm Bill is already a full year late, each delay is significant.

The rising price of fuel is continuing to spread problems across the nation. For several years the trucking industry has placed a fuel charge on bills to show their rate plus the additional fee incurred due to the rising cost of diesel. For us, each 5 cent per gallon rise in diesel increases our freight bill for the year by $2,000. Thinking back to the costs six months ago when we prepared our budget, we’re spending well over $50,000 more than we thought we would just to get donated food into the warehouse. And not one dime of that has gone to help the trucker do his job. Of course we’re now seeing the cost of processing food impact the cost of the food when it reaches the grocer. More people are finding it harder to make ends meet and are turning to church pantries for help. So, we need to bring in more food even though it costs more for each load that arrives at the same time our generous donors are seeing their own pocketbooks becoming a little emptier than before. Wind power, solar power, nuclear power and new drilling will take years to work through the research, environmental impact and exploration processes. The need for help is not going to go away any time soon and may continue to grow.

I spent time this week attending the Mississippi/Alabama Hurricane Conference in Mobile. It is good to know government leaders in both States are thinking about plans and are also adjusting plans because they know the cost of fuel is going to impact decisions by citizens related to the cost of evacuation when a call to evacuate is made. A false alarm can cost a family a week’s wages due to missed work as well as hundreds of dollars in fuel, hotel and meal costs. For many working families an evacuation robs them of any chance to take a family vacation. Spending 15 hours (each way) crawling along the interstate and eating meals in overcrowded fast food restaurants is not relaxing and can’t compare to a week at Disneyworld, but it costs just a much! With everything else going on, we need a quiet storm season.

April 2008. Moving forward!

Another month has gone by and the Farm Bill is still not passed. Nothing related to our food crisis has changed so I won’t rehash what I said last month. Congress needs to pass the Farm Bill.

Our kitchen project is coming along. If you walked into the 1600 square foot area it covers, I think you would recognize it as a kitchen under construction with huge range hoods, a walk-in cooler, sinks, etc. We expect the entire process to be completed in late April and will begin a test phase in May to ensure it’s ready for the start of our Summer Lunch service, a program that serves children, which begins June 2. In addition, the kitchen is also ready to serve the entire community as a disaster relief meal production site should any serious storm touch the Central Gulf Coast.

Construction of our Florida branch facility has not started. But, permit requests for initiation of the project have been submitted to the officials in Santa Rosa County and once approved, the land clearing and preparation will begin. We have begun seeking funding support from various foundations and organizations for racking equipment, emergency power and other items needed to make the best possible use of the warehouse. The new warehouse will significantly improve our ability to provide fresh and frozen food to the church pantries, soup kitchens and residential programs we serve. So we are very anxious to finish this project!

May is an important month for us, so we have already starting working with the Letter Carriers and postal officials to get ready for the annual Letter Carriers Food Drive, May 10^th. Food Banks across America participate, but the results of the Food Drive are particularly important for us with our coastal location. We will be checking and sorting all the donations collected by the Letter Carriers and then place most of it in our storage racks to hold as an emergency food reserve through the summer. If a storm should hit, the food will be distributed during the first days following the storm while roads are cleared and supplies from outside the area begin to arrive. If no storms hit, we’ll breathe a sigh of relief and use the food as part of our distribution effort this fall. Wherever you are, mark May 10^th on your calendar and hang some canned goods on your mail box. It is guaranteed to help someone.

Enjoy the spring weather!