This holiday season, local soup kitchens and food banks are stocked with people, and seem to have the funding to support them.
The number of New Yorkers who used a food pantry or soup kitchen increased by 21 percent in 2009, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger’s annual hunger survey report, released in November. The increased need put a strain on resources at kitchens like the one at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, a smaller food relief service that serves about 50 families per week.
“Last winter about this time we were really scraping the bottom of the barrel,” said Janet Dorman, the kitchen’s director. This year, more people are registering for services, and Dorman said they get 10 or 12 new families each week.
But federal spending by the Food Stamp Program and the economic recovery bill increased by more than $500 million in 2009, which helped to offset the huge increase in people who needed food, according to the same survey. As a result, the number of organizations forced to ration food and turn people away dropped 11 percent from 2008.
St. Mary’s has begun to receive more grant money and is doing much better financially, according to Dorman—a break from a general decline in the funding that her food relief center has received over past years.
“Most grants we get once a year, and those were definitely lessening over the past few years until this past year,” she said, but added that there were still opportunities to request money. “When things got really bad with the economy and it was really well known, we began to have opportunities to request more money.”
Not all local food relief providers have seen those opportunities, though.
Jaritt Sanders, social services assistant at Riverside Church, said he hadn’t felt the effects of any recent increase in funding.
“The amount of food we have doesn’t really change. It’s the amount of people that has increased,” he said. “We try to serve up to 60 families. Last week we had days of 80, which we allowed because of the holidays.”
Dorman said that the number of people who ask for food during the holiday season doesn’t seem to have changed.
“What we do notice is that people come and ask if we have turkeys to give out. Turkey availability has decreased in the last several years,” she said. “We actually haven’t had them for the past few years because people haven’t been able to donate them because they are more expensive.”
P.J. MacAlpine, the director of the Riverside Church Food Pantry, said the recession will have a long-term effect on their operation.
“Some say the economy is getting better, but I don’t know. Even if things were to be great tomorrow, it would still take time for us to feel the good effects,” she said. “It’s the trickle down theory. People relying on donations feel the bad economy two-fold because there are more people who need food and less people who have money to donate.”
For that reason, Dorman emphasized the importance of remembering the malnourished all the time, not just during the holidays.
“It’s more in the news during the holidays that food pantries are serving food, particularly around Thanksgiving,” she said. “But the fact is that people need to eat every day. Hunger is an everyday issue for these people. They don’t just get hungry around the holidays.”
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