News Types: News

Marin Independent Journal: Hunger Persists in Marin County

September 1, 2016

Despite an array of government and nonprofit programs aimed at curbing hunger in Marin, many residents in the county are still missing meals.

That was the point driven home Thursday when local government and nonprofit employees focused on feeding the hungry in Marin assembled at the Four Points Sheraton hotel in San Rafael to share information.

Participants included representatives from the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, St. Vincent de Paul Society of Marin, Extra Food.org, Marin Community Clinics, Agricultural Institute of Marin, San Geronimo Valley Community Center, Good Earth Natural Foods and Marin City Community Services District. The meeting was convened by First 5 Marin.

“Food insecurity is a major issue here in Marin,” said Grant Colfax, director of the county health and human services department. “We have this paradox where we’re such a wealthy county, food is part of our culture, and yet we have serious problems if you just dig below the surface a bit.”

One in five Marin residents is “food insecure,” Colfax said. “A quarter of our children are eligible for school meal assistance. And one in three older adults are at high nutrition risk.”

Becky Gershon, policy and advocacy coordinator for the San Francisco-Marin Food bank, elaborated on those numbers. According to a report that the food bank prepares annually, Marin’s poorest residents missed an estimated 11 million meals in 2014, despite that government assistance provided 9.2 million meals and Marin nonprofits supplied 5.7 million meals.

Gershon said Marin could be accessing an additional $21.6 million annually in federal food aid if the county could get all of the people who are eligible signed up for CalFresh, formerly known as food stamps.

Sheila Kopf, the food bank’s program director, said the food bank has doubled its distribution of food in Marin since the advent of the Great Recession. Through its 47 weekly food pantries, the food bank is delivering 14,500 meals per day in Marin to some 18,000 people each week, which amounts to 6.4 million pounds per year, Kopf said.

Miguel Villarreal, food and nutritional services director for the Novato Unified School District, said 31 percent of the students in his district, some 2,600 kids, qualify for school meal assistance, up from 11 percent or 1,600 kids in 2002.

Villarreal said he regularly gets letters from parents who say they can’t afford school lunches for their children even though they don’t qualify for assistance.

“We do have many families who earn above the poverty level but live way below cost of living standards for this area,” Villarreal said.

Rita Kessler, a representative of San Rafael City Schools, said six out of 10 students in her district qualify for school meal assistance. Kessler said San Rafael City Schools operated a summer lunch program for students this year and has added a supper program that serves 700 meals a day.

Terri Green, project director at the Marin City Community Services District, said the food bank operates three food pantries in Marin City.

“But it is definitely not enough,” said Green, who lamented the fact that the Marin City community lacks its own grocery store.

This summer Green served as site director for a summer meals program that fed more than 100 kids each day.

“I’ve never seen so many kids wanting seconds in all of my life; our children are hungry,” Green said. “We can’t be silent on these issues. We have to speak out on behalf of the poor and needy.”

Suzanne Sadowsky, associate director of San Geronimo Valley Community Center, said, “Things have changed. People who were formerly middle class are no longer in that situation. The cost of housing, the cost of medical care, the cost of heating your home has really put a tremendous strain on so many families.”

Sadowsky noted that federal eligibility requirements for food assistance fail to take into account differentials in housing costs.

“So if you’re at the poverty level in a state like Mississippi,” she said, “it is a very different story than being at even 200 percent of the poverty level in Marin County where families are being displaced from their homes day after day because of higher rental costs.”

Christine Paquette, executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Marin County, said in addition to serving about 200,000 meals last year, her organization advised more than 2,600 Marin residents as part of its homelessness prevention program.

“When we see these high rent increases, we get people calling us saying, ‘I’m not going to make my rent this month,’” Paquette said. “A lot of these folks have never needed help before.”

Article originally published by the Marin Independent Journal, September 1st, 2016
Written by Richard Halstead

View the original article here.

Marin Independent Journal: Marin Failing to Capture Millions in Food Aid

July 15, 2016

Marin is failing to harvest $21.6 million annually in federal funds that could be used to feed the county’s hungry, according to food bank officials.

Paul Ash, director of the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, told the Board of Supervisors this week that Marin’s poorest residents are missing an estimated 11 million meals per year, despite millions in CalFresh dollars available to help meet the need. The CalFresh program was formerly known as Food Stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on the federal level.

Ash was feted by supervisors as they celebrated the five-year anniversary of the successful merger of the Marin Food Bank with the San Francisco Food Bank.

“I will say there is a lot more work to be done,” he told supervisors.

Ash’s missed-meals estimate comes from a report that the Food Bank prepares annually.

The analysis first estimates the number of meals required each year to feed Marin residents whose household income falls below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. A single individual earning $23,540 a year or less falls into that category, as does a family of four earning $48,500 a year or less. CalFresh recipients’ gross income cannot exceed 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

POVERTY LEVEL

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were approximately 49,300 Marin residents, 19 percent of the county’s population, living below 200 percent of the federal poverty level in 2014.

To estimate how many meals a year low-income Marin residents are missing, Food Bank analysts first assumed that each of these 49,300 residents need to eat three meals a day, which means they require 53.9 million meals a year. They estimated that residents with this income could afford to buy about 27.9 million meals themselves. In addition to that they estimated that government assistance would provide an additional 9.2 million meals and that nonprofits, such as the Food Bank, supply another 5.7 million annually. That leaves about 11 million unaccounted for.

According to California Food Policy Advocates, an Oakland-based policy and advocacy group, only three states — North Dakota, Wyoming and Utah — do a worse job than California getting residents eligible for CalFresh signed up for the program. As a result, California misses out on $5 billion in federal funding annually, Ash said. And among California’s 58 counties, Marin ranks 55th — only Modoc, Napa and Mono counties do a poorer job.

STATE-LEVEL SYSTEM

Ash said states that have been successful getting people signed up for federal food assistance have taken a more centralized approach than California, which has each county develop its own program.

“What we’re doing here in California is building a state-level system for each county,” Ash said. “Whereas in a state like Oregon they have one computer system, they have one form, they’ve highly engineered the process of signing up. It would be the difference between the standard 17-page CalFresh application and making an order on Amazon with a few clicks.”

Ash said California also needs to try harder to sign people up for more than one assistance program at a time. He said more successful states “try to make every touch an opportunity to try to get clients to all the services they may be eligible for.”

Ash suspects the failure to focus on this dual approach is one reason why Marin’s utilization rate is so low.

He said outreach is also important. In San Francisco, the health department has secured grants to station health care workers outside the CalFresh office. In Marin, the Food Bank has used grant money to mount its own effort to get people signed up for CalFresh.

“We can’t sign people up for the program,” Ash said. “But we can help them with the application because the application tends to be confusing and difficult to complete.”

SOME RELUCTANT

Kari Beuerman, the county of Marin’s social services director, said an effort was made to get Marin residents to sign up for CalFresh when the county was seeking to register people for insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Beuerman said that wasn’t always successful. She said the number of people covered by Medi-Cal in Marin, is much higher than the 10,000 registered for CalFresh.

“I think some people feel that it is not worth their while because the amount of assistance they’re going to get is so small,” Beuerman said. “It can be quite low if somebody is barely in that threshold of qualifying. It really depends on the person and their financial circumstances and their household size.”

Beuerman said the biggest hurdle seems to be the stigma attached to the program, especially for older potential recipients.

“Seniors are especially reluctant to accept what they think is welfare,” Beuerman said.

Ash said CalFresh typically provides about $6 a day per recipient and is critical to bridging the gap between what the Food Bank can provide and what low-income Marin residents need.

“We’re not able to give people all the food they need to eat,” he said. “It’s families that get both kinds of assistance that are more likely to be successful feeding themselves and not missing meals.”

Article originally published by the Marin Independent Journal, July 15th, 2016
Written by Richard Halstead

Read the original article here.

San Francisco Chronicle: Demand Grows for Food Bank Services in Marin

February 20, 2016

School started with a long line two hours before the first bell rang at Laurel Dell Elementary in San Rafael.

It wasn’t schoolkids in the line, but their moms. Thirty-nine of them. And they weren’t there to help read storybooks.

They were there on a recent morning because they needed food — and the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank’s weekly distribution is the only way they can get enough of it. In Marin County, which the U.S. Census Bureau lists as the 17th-richest county in the U.S. by median income, poor people go hungry every day, even while they’re working two jobs with backbreaking hours.

People like Esperanza Martinez. Her two children were still asleep as she stood in line, and after she went back home with her box of potatoes, frozen chicken, carrots and tortillas, she circled back to school at the west edge of town to drop off the kids. Then she spent all day working as a babysitter and a house cleaner.

“My husband paints houses, does construction, he remodels houses, and we still barely make the rent,” Martinez said, cradling the food box in her arms. “We work so hard, so hard. But this food — this food will feed my family for three days. We will be OK with this.”

5-year increase

Workers and volunteers at the food bank say they are hearing of harsh realities like Martinez’s more often than ever. The organization is marking its fifth anniversary as a two-county operation, and a look at the numbers shows that rather than getting better, hunger is only biting deeper among the people it serves.

Since San Francisco’s food bank was combined with Marin’s in January 2011, the total food given out in both counties has increased from 39 million pounds a year to 46 million pounds today.

San Francisco’s bigger population of 805,235, compared with Marin’s 252,409, means that the bulk of the need is in the city. But for those who run the food bank, the most surprising increase in demand has been in that tree-studded land of spacious houses, top-draw musicians and famously liberal politics, Marin County.

The annual distribution of food in Marin jumped by 50 percent, from 4 million pounds five years ago to 6 million pounds now. In 2007, just before the recession, the total was a little over 2 million pounds.

“This really started changing in Marin in some places you might not expect, particularly during the recession — more people started asking for help,” said Leslie Bacho, chief operating officer of the food bank. “There is more poverty in the county than I think people realize or want to see.”

The growing need might have been expected in historically low-income areas such as Marin City. But the food bank says it’s also turning up in Tiburon, Fairfax and other affluent towns.

Before the merger, the Marin food bank had 18 spots where it handed out food once a month. Now there are 47 such sites, and they operate every week.

“In just about all of our communities now, we have pockets of need,” Bacho said.

Rich-poor gap

According to the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies, inequality has increased more rapidly in the Bay Area since 1989 than in California or the nation — and Marin is leading the way. It has the highest disparity between rich and poor in the Bay Area, a yawning gap of $397,296 annually between the average among the top and bottom 20 percent of earners.

San Francisco, with a gap of $300,000, ties for second in that distinction with San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.

Overall, the food bank estimates that 1 of every 4 people in Marin and San Francisco goes hungry at times. Dignity usually keeps that food struggle out of view, though.

“You’d think you’d see it all the time, but you don’t,” said Goldie Pyka, spokeswoman for the food bank. “You pass someone on the street, they don’t wear T-shirts saying they are hungry. But they are. And there are so many different types of people in need.”

About 15 percent of those who use the food pantries are homeless, Pyka said. “The rest are working, unemployed, disabled, elderly, you name it. They’re bus drivers, teachers, receptionists, gardeners. They are your neighbors.”

Out of public eye

The principal at Laura Dell Elementary School, which has hosted a food-bank pantry since 2012, said distributions before dawn fit parents’ schedules and let them pick up their food privately, away from prying eyes or the bustle of a full schoolground.

“I am shocked at how many people are squeezed here in Marin, where when you read about the county it usually just talks about million-dollar homes and affluence,” Principal Pepe Gonzalez said as he helped unload a pallet of food for the giveaway the other day. “But there’s not so much of a middle class here anymore.

“To stay afloat in Marin, you have to most likely have a dual income, or someone in the house is raking it in,” Gonzalez said.

Seeing a neighbor

Across town at the Whistlestop senior center later that morning, 120 elderly people picked up their food. As at the elementary school, most of it was produce — 60 percent of the food bank’s supply consists of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Even after having volunteered for several years, Ted Sempliner found a surprise waiting for him as he helped with the distribution.

“I looked up, and there was my neighbor,” Sempliner said. “He was a little embarrassed that I saw him there. He lives on an $800,000 houseboat just off Sausalito, but just doesn’t have much money. That’s how it is sometimes, house-rich but cash-poor. So here he is, in line for free food.

“Things happen to people, that’s all I can say.”

 Reposted from SFGate.com View the video story here >>

Article originally published by the San Francisco Chronicle, February 20th, 2016
Written by Kevin Fagan
View the original story here >>

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron

People of the Bay Area: Robert Alvarez from the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank

January 27, 2016

BayArea.com is sponsoring Taste of the NFL, a charity event that has raised more than $24 million over 24 years for food banks across the country, including three in the Bay Area. We decided to meet some of the people who help get those funds where they need to go.

By the time the kid with a Yoda backpack (Luke-on-Dagobah style) walks in, things are already a little rowdy. He and his friends scurry and shove while the girls cluster in a corner on the floor. Their mothers are exchanging the week’s gossip, and everywhere people are recognizing each other and calling across the room. Younger couples sit close together, the women in tights and their boyfriends in high-end down jackets. A teenager leans on the wall and frowns at her phone. An old-timer lingers at the edge of the group, serene and aloof from the commotion of a hundred people crammed into this small-ish break room on a gray Saturday morning. It’s not raining just now, but outside this bleak little borderland between Potrero Hill and Dogpatch is still soggy and cold after a week of the stuff.

Senior Project Leader Robert Alvarez waits a few minutes past the 9 a.m. start time before climbing onto a seat and sending his voice out in a boom that cuts through the din and quiets the room.

“Thanks for coming out to volunteer with us today at the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank,” he begins with one of his friendly, if slightly lopsided smiles. “Hands up if you’ve been here before.” Half the hands in the room shoot up. “Hands up if this is your first time.” A scattering go up, including my own. “And hands up if you’re not going to put your hand up no matter what I say.” A handful of kids raise their hands and giggle, and Alvarez giggles himself.

“Today we’re going to be in two teams. One will be sorting apples and oranges and the other will sort out some other types of food into boxes for some senior citizens. We’re going to break into groups, so if you want to be with your friends, stick together. If you don’t want to be with anyone, get as far away as you can.” And with that he leads us out into the warehouse, shelves stacked high with boxes, the forklifts arranged around other machinery, muted boomboxes on the walls. Uniformed employees wait like handlers in a sheep pen.

Within minutes we’ve been split into groups and arranged along a production line that will construct, pack, tape and stack boxes of rice, canned fruit, beans, salmon, chili, long-life milk and cereal for senior citizens who would otherwise go hungry because of meager pensions. I take a position beside a pallet stacked with boxes of rice. My job is to open the boxes and keep a steady supply to the person in front of me, who’ll be placing a bag in each box as it goes by. That person happens to be about 3 feet tall, but she’s taking her job very seriously, carefully placing each bag into each box like a benevolent princess while her mom chats to a friend across the line.

I hand my empty boxes over the production line to a group of 10-year-old boys on box duty. They were the first to sign up when our supervisor, Vladimir (self-described “big ugly guy with the good taste in music”), asked for volunteers to “break things.” They attack every box with enthusiastic ferocity, but paper cuts take their toll and by halftime, their mothers have taken over.

What’s amazing about all of this is how Alvarez and his small team have, in the space of 15 minutes, transformed a ragtag group of overly enthusiastic volunteers — ranging from ages 8 through 78 — into a relatively cohesive unit, churning out boxes of food and produce at an almost-industrial rate.

“Over the years you refine the tactics of what’s going on,” says Alvarez toward the end of the morning’s shift, sitting in the now-empty break room. “Like today, I was expecting about 90 volunteers and I ended up with a little over 100.” With his mustache and his long dark hair in a loose braid down his back, Alvarez seems permanently at ease. He smiles a lot. He seems to posses infinite reserves of patience. His laugh comes easy. “Sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge because some days, like today, we have younger groups,” he goes on, “and their attention span is … not that great.” He laughs again. “But they are willing to help. You’ve just got to make it fun and interesting.”

“They like to put the stickers on the apples. It’s putting on a ‘sticker’ for them, but they’re putting on the ‘labels’ for us.”

Back on the production line, someone has given the miniature rice handler in front of me a step to stand on, and now that she doesn’t have to reach up on tiptoes to get at the rice bags her productivity has shot up. All of a sudden I don’t have so much time to chat to the young professional at the station beside me. His name is Anu and he’s been in San Francisco for three years, a veritable lifetime in some circles.

For his part, Alvarez has lived in this area all of his 33 years, and currently resides in Bernal Heights with his parents and younger siblings. “My mom has a day care at home, so even when I’m not here sometimes when I’m at home I see little kids running around the house. So I’m always involved with kids.”

He’s been working at the food bank for 10 years, and was a regular volunteer long before that. He’s seen a lot of people walk through the doors — the food bank lists around 30,000 volunteers — and he greets his regulars by name. “The most interesting part about my job is all the different volunteers that want to come and help out,” he says. At one point during our chat, an elderly lady comes in to ask Alvarez something. She spots my voice recorder and says she has one of her own.

“What for?” asks Alvarez.

“For singing. I’m in a band,” she smiles, and leaves us unsure of whether she was joking or not.

After a brief rest break, we’re back on the floor and slugging away once more. The kids have calmed down now, concentrating on getting through the last one-and-a-half hours while their parents chat over the cans, bags and boxes moving through their hands. We chat with members of a church group, some Scouts and a handful of parents who bring their kids along once a fortnight, once a month, or whenever they can.

“When I was growing up, this was never a school requirement,” says Alvarez, “and nowadays it is. It helps them understand that there are people out there that might not be doing so good as them, and that they can always help each other out.”

The most rewarding part of Alvarez’s job is knowing that the food he’s handling will be in somebody’s home within three days. “It’s an immediate impact that you’re making out there in the community,” he says.

The Food Bank’s biggest challenge at the moment is space. “Demand (for food bank services) has increased because people are having to work harder to make ends meet, and are realizing that they can use the help,” says Alvarez. “So instead of them choosing between paying a bill, paying rent or deciding if they should buy food, now they can go to one of our agencies or pantries and pick up some fresh fruits, vegetables, some dairy, some meat. And they’re able to pay their bills and relax a bit.”

Our shift winds up at midday and we troop out into a gray afternoon, eager to relax away the rest of our Saturday. Alvarez, who has been at work since 6:30 a.m., still has to train another crop of volunteers, run their shift and pack up before he goes home. He works Tuesday through Saturday, although he says right now “it seems like I’m here every day.”

Still, he maintains that the Food Bank wouldn’t be operational without volunteers. Those 30,000 registered volunteers equate to a workforce of 71 full-time employees, and the money saved on wages buys more food for people who need it. About 47 million pounds of food was delivered in 2015 by Alvarez, the Food Bank staff, community partners and volunteers, and he says they’re on track to deliver 48 million pounds in 2016.

For anyone else, handling that much food with a workforce of volunteers who must be trained two or three times per day would be something to brag about. For his part, Robert Alvarez just seems to enjoy welcoming new faces, bantering with the familiar ones and knowing that he’s making a difference in his community.

You can — and should! — sign up for a volunteer shift at the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank here.

Reposted from BayArea.com

View the original story here >>

By Quinten Dol

Foodies and Bargain-Hunters Cruise Different Aisles: SF Public Press

January 21, 2016

As income inequality grows, gourmet trend highlights the need for inexpensive groceries

If you shop at Casa Lucas and then Local Mission Market three blocks away, the contrasts of modern-day San Francisco come into sharp focus.
Casa Lucas, on the Mission District’s central artery of 24th Street for over 35 years, boasts a massive selection of produce, meats and traditional Latin American items, such as tamarind candy and chicharrones, near the register. You can get red potatoes for 79 cents a pound and a loaf of bread for $2.99.
At Local Mission Market, which opened in 2013, pulsating house music greets shoppers, and artfully lettered chalkboards announce that everything is locally sourced and fresh. Here, red potatoes go for $1 per pound and the cheapest loaf of sandwich bread is $6.50.
These stores are targeting two distinct populations with different priorities. One serves the area’s longtime Latino residents, many of whom are lower-income and need to spend as little as possible when shopping to feed their families. And its stock comes from far and wide. The other serves residents from far and wide who can afford premium prices for freshness and the cachet of buying from local vendors. The latter group can choose to shop any number of ways and in many places. But lower-income San Franciscans are increasingly unable to afford enough of the food they need to stay healthy.
The San Francisco Food Security Task Force, a city-sponsored working group, reported in May 2015 that one-third of adults in the city with incomes less than double the federal poverty level were “food insecure” in 2011 through 2012. That was up from 26 percent in 2003 but down from 44 percent in 2009, the depths of the Great Recession. People are food insecure when they cannot afford or get enough nutritious food that they’re accustomed to in order to support a healthy life.
Subsidies Fall Short of Need
Low-income state residents struggling to put food on their tables can get help through two federally funded programs: CalFresh, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — formerly known as food stamps and now often known as EBT (for the electronic benefits transfer cards that recipients use) — and WIC, which serves women, infants and children. But officials have said that only about half the California families that qualify for food assistance are getting it, and many families that don’t qualify for public assistance still can’t afford sufficient nutritious food.
The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank estimated in 2014 that families of 11,000 city public school students were eligible for CalFresh but not receiving help. Already, 30,000 families in San Francisco and Marin counties receive help from the pantries each week, and food for 107,000 meals is distributed daily.
Guillermo Garcia sells at farmers markets throughout San Francisco for Edith’s Gourmet Baking Co., which is based in Modesto. He has seen shoppers cut back as his company increased bread prices to offset higher costs for flour, butter and sugar.
“Before, when we had a two-for-$7 deal they would buy two loaves,” Garcia said. “Now, since we changed our prices to $4, they only buy one.”
It is not just low-wage and unemployed people who cannot afford healthy groceries. “We have a sense that there are people in the middle tier who need food assistance,” said Paul Ash, executive director of the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank.
“We are trying to come up with a food-assistance model that doesn’t seem like handouts, that feels good to go get,” Ash said. “These are busy working people; they can’t stop in the middle of the day to go to a pantry at their kids’ school.”
Lena Miller, who was born and raised in the Bayview, said that as a single parent of two teenagers, she has to cut into everything else to pay for food. Entertainment is gone. “You can have less food, but it’s hard to tell kids that there’s no food.”
Ash said that a big obstacle to creating food security in San Francisco is the large gap between the maximum income that CalFresh recipients can earn and what it takes to be self-sufficient in San Francisco.
Ash urged the city to pressure businesses not to cater only to the forces of gentrification. “If you want to come in and take advantage of the high-end population,” he said, “then you’ve got to make sure people across the city are fed.”
This article is part of a special reporting project on the cost of living in the Winter 2016 print edition of the Public Press.
Reposted from San Francisco Public Press
By Caroline Cakebread
View the original story here >>

SF Public Press: Well-Off Foodies, Bargain-Hunters, Cruise Different Aisles

January 21, 2016

By Caroline Cakebread

As income inequality grows, gourmet trend highlights the need for inexpensive groceries

If you shop at Casa Lucas and then Local Mission Market three blocks away, the contrasts of modern-day San Francisco come into sharp focus.

Casa Lucas, on the Mission District’s central artery of 24th Street for over 35 years, boasts a massive selection of produce, meats and traditional Latin American items, such as tamarind candy and chicharrones, near the register. You can get red potatoes for 79 cents a pound and a loaf of bread for $2.99.

At Local Mission Market, which opened in 2013, pulsating house music greets shoppers, and artfully lettered chalkboards announce that everything is locally sourced and fresh. Here, red potatoes go for $1 per pound and the cheapest loaf of sandwich bread is $6.50.

These stores are targeting two distinct populations with different priorities. One serves the area’s longtime Latino residents, many of whom are lower-income and need to spend as little as possible when shopping to feed their families. And its stock comes from far and wide. The other serves residents from far and wide who can afford premium prices for freshness and the cachet of buying from local vendors.

The latter group can choose to shop any number of ways and in many places. But lower-income San Franciscans are increasingly unable to afford enough of the food they need to stay healthy.

The San Francisco Food Security Task Force, a city-sponsored working group, reported in May 2015 that one-third of adults in the city with incomes less than double the federal poverty level were “food insecure” in 2011 through 2012. That was up from 26 percent in 2003 but down from 44 percent in 2009, the depths of the Great Recession. People are food insecure when they cannot afford or get enough nutritious food that they’re accustomed to in order to support a healthy life.

Subsidies Fall Short of Need

Low-income state residents struggling to put food on their tables can get help through two federally funded programs: CalFresh, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — formerly known as food stamps and now often known as EBT (for the electronic benefits transfer cards that recipients use) — and WIC, which serves women, infants and children. But officials have said that only about half the California families that qualify for food assistance are getting it, and many families that don’t qualify for public assistance still can’t afford sufficient nutritious food.

The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank estimated in 2014 that families of 11,000 city public school students were eligible for CalFresh but not receiving help. Already, 30,000 families in San Francisco and Marin counties receive help from the pantries each week, and food for 107,000 meals is distributed daily.

Guillermo Garcia sells at farmers markets throughout San Francisco for Edith’s Gourmet Baking Co., which is based in Modesto. He has seen shoppers cut back as his company increased bread prices to offset higher costs for flour, butter and sugar.

“Before, when we had a two-for-$7 deal they would buy two loaves,” Garcia said. “Now, since we changed our prices to $4, they only buy one.”

It is not just low-wage and unemployed people who cannot afford healthy groceries. “We have a sense that there are people in the middle tier who need food assistance,” said Paul Ash, executive director of the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank.
“We are trying to come up with a food-assistance model that doesn’t seem like handouts, that feels good to go get,” Ash said. “These are busy working people; they can’t stop in the middle of the day to go to a pantry at their kids’ school.”
Lena Miller, who was born and raised in the Bayview, said that as a single parent of two teenagers, she has to cut into everything else to pay for food. Entertainment is gone. “You can have less food, but it’s hard to tell kids that there’s no food.”

Ash said that a big obstacle to creating food security in San Francisco is the large gap between the maximum income that CalFresh recipients can earn and what it takes to be self-sufficient in San Francisco.
Ash urged the city to pressure businesses not to cater only to the forces of gentrification. “If you want to come in and take advantage of the high-end population,” he said, “then you’ve got to make sure people across the city are fed.”
This article is part of a special reporting project on the cost of living in the Winter 2016 print edition of the Public Press.

View the original story here >>

KQED: Project Homeless Connect Provides Diverse Resources for Homeless San Franciscans

December 7, 2015

Not only do the almost 7,000 homeless residents of San Francisco have to grapple with the obvious challenges of homelessness, there’s another hidden set of challenges that come with their situation: simply accessing the services designed to help them.

Say you’re homeless and trying to get information about your veteran benefits. Once you’ve found the money to ride across the city on Muni, you might wait in line for two hours for an appointment. Then, when you finally reach the front of the line, you realize that you’ve you left your ID at the shelter where you’re staying. Or maybe you reach into your pack to pull out your ID, but realize that everything else you carry in your pack damaged it. Or maybe you left it at another shelter. Now you’ve wasted two hours, and have to trek back across the city. You know what church offers a free meal, but it’s later than you anticipated and they’ve stopped serving: your failed errand has cost you dinner.

That’s just a sample scenario of what homeless residents face everyday while trying to access the services geared to help the: a maze of small indignities and painfully banal problems that might seem simple to housed residents (Muni fare, internet access to look up a service’s hours, a safe place to store valuables) but are magnified to insurmountable obstacles to those experiencing homelessness. San Francisco’s Project Homeless Connect aims to change that. The organization holds all-in-one help days several times a year offering over 150 services to assist homeless residents with everything from pet care to getting a California ID card.

“Project Homeless Connect is not about duplicating what already exists in the community, but bringing together what exists and making it easier to access for people experiencing homelessness,” said Emily Cohen, the group’s Deputy Director. “The idea of putting together over 100 different non-profit and city agencies together in a single day is so somebody doesn’t have to go all over town for months trying to get the things that they need, but can talk to the people they need all at once, in a single day.”

A sprawling PHC event (Jamey Thomas)

Project Homeless Connect got its start in 2004 when then-mayor Gavin Newsom launched the program in conjunction with the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Since then, they’ve held about five well attended events a year: they’ve now served over 75,000 homeless and low income San Franciscans. In 2012, they spun off the events into a daily program, called Every Day Connect, that offers the same kind of needs-based matchmaking on an everyday basis. The large events have been lauded for their success by the federal government’s Interagency Council on Homelessness, who deemed it a best practice model. The concept has also been replicated in over 200 cities across the country and in Canada and Australia.

“We really pride ourselves on hospitality, and treating every person who comes through our doors with the utmost dignity and respect: greeting them warmly, offering them a cup of coffee while they wait, and making people feel welcomed,” Cohen said. “We really believe that services in a dignified and compassionate setting are the most successful.”

The next PHC event happens December 16. Before every event, a small army of volunteers is marshaled, a corporate sponsor secured. Volunteers spend the weeks leading up to the event handing out flyers to promote it, but Cohen said the biggest driver of traffic is word of mouth: “‘When people come to Project Homeless Connect and get what they need, and they’re treated with dignity and respect, they share that message with their friends and their peers, [and] it snowballs.”

A typical PHC event aims to cover every resource a homeless or low income person could need, including hair cuts, dental procedures, STD tests, and legal counseling. At their last event in September, they handed out 475 pairs of reading glasses, exchanged 175 needles and repaired 23 walkers or wheelchairs.

Food is also a focus. All attendees have the option to bring home a bag of groceries, provided by the SF Marin Food Bank and carefully tailored to their situation: are they living on the streets, with no access to refrigeration? Are they living in a shelter with limited kitchen access? Are they living in a cramped SRO with no cooking supplies? Attendees, and volunteers, also get a lunch served in a pop-up cafe, typically with relaxing live music playing in the background.

Bags of food for participants from the Food Bank. (Jamey Thomas)

For those who want to donate food, Goldie Pyka, the public relations manager for the Food Bank, recommends looking at their list of most needed items. But there are special considerations to keep in mind when donating to a largely homeless population: “Many of the people who come to PHC also have dental concerns, so soft foods are preferable. Think apple sauce, instant-oatmeal, canned fruits and veggies, beans, etc,” Pyka wrote in an email. “It may sound obvious, but people who are homeless generally have very few personal possessions, so ready-to-eat items are best. But this also means that other items, like ultra-sturdy bags and can openers, are critically important.”

There are also certain items to avoid: “A small but important note is to avoid foods that contain poppy seeds as these can, in some cases, result in a false-positive drug test,” she wrote.

And while some of PHC’s event offerings don’t deal with immediate concerns like food and shelter, Cohen says amenities like photo portraits and massage are still vital services in other ways.

“There are so many sort of peripheral benefits to the services we provide. Take massage. People experiencing homelessness have very high levels of stress in their lives, and to be able to help alleviate some of that burden is tremendous,” Cohen said.

“People sleeping on hard ground outside? Their backs hurt. They’re carrying around their belongings on their feet a lot, so being able to provide massage is a really nice gift,” she continued. “It’s not what you think of when you think of when you think of ending homelessness. But it restores dignity, it restores well being, and it’s a really important part of what we do.”

Like many nonprofits, PHC cobbles together their funding from a variety of sources: city funds, corporate sponsorship, grants and individual donations. And like every nonprofit, they’re in constant need of more of that funding. The group is hoping to expand their events, possibly by making them smaller and more frequent, or devising a mobile event to reach more people.

Yet for all the challenges that come with running such ambitious and large scale events, Cohen says there’s one thing they don’t have to worry about: the support of their community. The group has an active group of hundreds of volunteers who eagerly return to each event. And the group is also a shrewd user of social media. Using the hashtag #PHChelps, they post items needed by their clients–say, a new pair of work boots for someone who got a construction job. Followers repost the message, ideally finding someone who has a spare pair of boots or who’s willing to buy a pair for them off of Amazon. Not every request gets fulfilled, but Cohen said she’s been impressed with the response.

Volunteers prepare bags of food for a PHC event. (Jamey Thomas)
“Homelessness is a community problem and it’s going to require a community response. PHC provides that apparatus for folks in San Francisco and in the Bay Area to get involved, and be an active participant in the solution,” she said. “We get calls everyday from people saying,‘I want to help. I don’t know what to do, but there are so many homeless people in San Francisco, and I want to do something.’ We offer them the ability to get really involved.”

Reposted from KQED
Written by Shelby Pope

View the original story here >>

Marin Independent Journal: Low-income Marin residents missing six meals a week

March 12, 2015

by Megan Hansen
Low-income Marin County residents are missing fewer meals than in years past, but the average person in this group can still miss out on about six meals each week.
A recent report by the San Francisco and Marin Food Bank states people missed one less meal each week in 2012 than they did in 2007 because of nonprofit and government assistance, according to the most recent data available. While that’s an improvement for hungry residents, nonprofit leaders say the lack of job growth and low wages make it continually difficult for people to afford food.

“We’ve made some progress, but we’re not even halfway back to where we were pre-recession,” said Paul Ash, executive director for the San Francisco and Marin Food Bank. “There are still folks out there making wages similar to what they were in 2007, even though the costs of living and especially housing are going up.”

While low-income people do have money to spend on food, Ash said, they simply don’t have enough money to cover all their meals. Even with help from CalFresh, the federal program formerly known as food stamps, and meals from food pantries, residents often end up ignoring hunger to pay for life’s other necessities.

“Food is oftentimes where that friction gets played out. You can’t afford to not buy your bus pass or drive to work, but you can afford to skip a meal,” Ash said. “It’s the one thing that gets left at the bottom of the heap, sometimes.”

Missing mealsCountywide, low-income residents were able to provide 21.2 million meals for themselves in 2012. Federal assistance provided 9.8 million meals and nonprofits provided 4.8 million meals. Despite the help, it’s estimated Marin residents still missed 12.5 million meals in 2012.

These low-income residents are identified in the food bank’s report as people living at the 185 percent federal poverty level. A family of four at this level made $42,600 in 2012.

Teri Olle, advocacy director for the San Francisco and Marin Food Bank, said Marin, like many other counties, saw a dramatic increase in the number of people in need of food during the recession. In fact, the San Francisco Food Bank began distributing food in Marin in 2008, after the national economy began its spiral downward and the Marin Food Bank failed to meet a sharply increased demand for food. The two agencies combined in 2011.

“Over the last five years, the growth in the nonprofit contribution in Marin has doubled,” Olle said.

The San Francisco and Marin Food Bank has 47 pantries in Marin, plus another pantry is scheduled to open in April at Olive Elementary School in Novato. Food from the San Francisco nonprofit is also doled out to Ritter Center in downtown San Rafael, which provides a range of services to the homeless and working poor.

Food assistance Ben Leroi, deputy director for Ritter Center, said the center saw a huge increase in the use of its food pantry in 2008 and 2009. He said not much has changed since then due to the increased costs of living, rising rents and low wages.

“The people who started coming to us, most of them are still coming. We haven’t seen a huge drop-off since the great recession,” Leroi said. “That points to me that people really needed the supplemental assistance all along. Once they were forced to, they realized how helpful it is.”

The center distributed more than 27,000 bags of groceries last year to Marin residents. Each week the center gives bags of food to about 330 to 380 households, representing more than 600 people. Bags are filled with seasonal produce, canned goods, rice, potatoes and onions.

Leroi said the distribution allows needy families to save anywhere from $20 to $50 a week on groceries — funds that can be spent elsewhere on medications, transportation and rent.

“It’s really a homeless prevention strategy. It provides a way to subsidize people’s monthly budgets without actually giving away dollars,” Leroi said.

In addition, the center helps people register for CalFresh assistance.

“The CalFresh program has been a wonderful resource. We’ve done a huge amount of CalFresh applications,” Leroi said. “We help them do all the paperwork.”

Follow Megan Hansen’s blog at http://blogs.marinij.com/bureaucratsandbaking.

About the Author

Megan Hansen is a reporter for the Marin Independent Journal covering San Rafael, Larkspur and Corte Madera. She has worked for various media outlets and community newspapers since 2009. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a minor in digital media from California State University, Sacramento. She is a Sacramento native and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. Reach the author at mhansen@marinij.com or follow Megan on Twitter: @HansenMegan.