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As the coronavirus strains the economy, local community centers that provide food to families in need and those without a home to cook have torn through annual budgets while their volunteer pool has all but dried up.
The situation reached a breaking point last week when the National Guard was asked to step into the workflow at Nourish Pierce County, one of the area’s largest food banks. More than 66,000 people visit one of its pantries over the course of a typical year, but amid fallout from the spread of COVID-19, CEO Sue Potter expects to see well over 100,000 in 2020.
Those numbers mean that one in 10 Pierce County residents will visit a Nourish food pantry this year.
“Truthfully, it’s been the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in a month,” Potter said of the National Guard’s deployment. “I think my team here has done a remarkable job pivoting our model, but it has been stressful. It feels like somebody has thrown us a life raft.”
As a fully donor-funded nonprofit, Nourish has struggled to handle the onslaught of structural changes necessary to ensure the safety and health of staff, volunteers and guests under coronavirus guidelines. Typically, its donation sites resemble a grocery store, with produce stacked and boxes lined up along shelves for guests to shop freely. Now they pre-pack boxes for quick and contactless curbside pickup.
“In a crisis, when we know our client numbers are going to double, and we had to completely shift how we operate,” Potter told The News Tribune in a phone call last week. “It’s been really hard to plug people in, to do it appropriately.”
Since March, Nourish had been asking older volunteers — who make up a bulk of its workforce — to stay home. That left a ragged team of core volunteers and a few staffers, at least one at each of about 20 sites.
“People are getting tired,” said Potter. “Now, with the Guard coming in, we’ll have a real good core crew to pair with EMS volunteers and some longtime core Nourish volunteers who are sticking with us. We’re going to have some power teams, people who can really crank out these boxes.”
VOLUNTEERS STILL NEEDED ELSEWHERE
Eloise’s Cooking Pot, a program of the Making A Difference Foundation based on Tacoma’s Eastside, serves about 30,000 Pierce County families and distributes more than 2 million pounds of food annually, about 40 percent through home delivery.
As COVID-19 spread, the organization switched to a pickup model for its onsite pantry and added a secondary delivery channel for food that kids would typically receive at school.
“For us, we were fortunate because we’re already dealing with people at door-delivery systems,” said founder and director Ahndrea Blue. Nonetheless, without outside support like the National Guard, “Our biggest challenge has been volunteers. My normal staff, they’re taxed. It’s starting to get hard.”
It’s not just that volunteers tend to be older.
In fact, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau on behalf of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a quarter of the Silent Generation volunteers — compared to more than a third of Generation X, and roughly 30 percent of baby boomers and millennials.
“People just don’t want to expose themselves, and you just have to respect them for that,” said Blue, who herself has eschewed visits to her parents, both diagnosed with cancer, to remain on the front lines with her team.
Usually running with 20 to 30 volunteers, she hired 15 temporary workers to “keep up with the demand.” On Monday, six volunteer drivers showed up, and she was thrilled.
At the Food Connection, part of St. Leo Catholic Parish in Tacoma, executive director Kevin Glackin-Coley has noticed the same decrease in volunteers and increase in need for its services.
“We have a lot of volunteers who have stepped back because of health issues or risk factors,” he said. “We tend to get lots of volunteer groups, and none of those groups are coming in.”
The shift to pre-boxing means right now the organization needs more manpower than ever — 20 to 25 people a day “to do it smoothly.”
Its walk-up food pantry — where half of visitors live in a household with at least one working adult or social security recipient — also transitioned from a grocery store model to curbside pickup. Its weekend backpack program, which provides meals to Tacoma School District students, expanded “on the fly” from Friday deliveries to twice weekly, including breakfast and lunch.
Healthy volunteers can assist by sorting food deliveries, packing boxes or dropping off the boxes at area middle schools.
“Basically, we need people,” said Glackin-Coley. He added that financial donations are always welcome, especially as the nonprofit spends more on food “because donation streams might slow down or just not keep up with the increased demand that we expect.”
For reference, a truckload of peanut butter costs about $20,000, according to Nourish’s Potter. A half-order of canned beef chili and cream of mushroom soup costs $30,000. That’s through the same wholesale channels used by grocers.
Likewise, Blue encourages support through whatever means available to you, whether that’s donating your time and labor or simply dropping off donations of food or cleaning products.
For those healthy, able and willing, she recognized that the biggest hurdle might be overcoming that feeling of unease in putting yourself at risk. Eloise’s volunteer coordinator vets potential helpers to ensure they are well enough to serve and equips everyone with masks and gloves. Volunteers are spaced safely six feet apart.
“People feel more comfortable once they get there,” she said.
You also can help by making deliveries in your own vehicle.
MULTI-SITE OPERATIONS
Volunteers also can help feed the more than 200 people served through the now scattered programs of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington.
The organization offers three meals a day at its main overnight shelter, which has been fragmented due to the closure of dine-in services. Only the 80 guests currently staying at Nativity House can eat inside, while another 150 people accept food through a pickup system now set up outside.
Additionally, CCSWW serves 15 to 30 guests at the Family Housing Network in South Tacoma and 60 people at its stability site.
Meanwhile, 60 older guests were moved to a downtown hotel after several tested positive for the coronavirus, as The News Tribune columnist Matt Driscoll reported. CCSWW is paying Meals on Wheels to deliver food to the hotel, but only on weekdays. That adds an extra burden on the two core cooks who have been toiling in the Nativity House kitchen preparing meals for all of the above.
Volunteer coordinator Shannon Cline is looking for people to assist in onsite meal preparation and kitchen help — everything from chopping vegetables to making sandwiches, serving food to washing dishes.
Only a few people will work in the kitchen at any given time to ensure proper social distancing, and all necessary safety equipment is provided.
Still, Cline said, “A huge portion of our volunteer base is not in the building. So many have stepped in and said, ‘We will drop off the ingredients.’”
CCSWW will accept donations ranging from giant cans of tomato sauce and bags of Costco-sized boxes of pasta, to cases of water, granola bars and individually wrapped snacks — all the way to prepared grab-and-go meals like sandwiches, burritos or cups of soup. These kinds of “bagged lunches” are in high demand on weekends.
“Obviously we are trying to have a variety of things that people can eat, but in this time anything is better than nothing,” said Cline.
She sees a silver lining in this crisis, that people are taking the time to consider what it means to “stay at home” when you don’t have a home, and that the acts of kindness continue well into the future. Maybe that’s an extra bag of rice for every trip to Costco or a case of water a month.
Glackin-Coley hopes for a similar reckoning.
“What this pandemic is exposing is how tenuous the safety net is in our community,” he said. “There are a number of people who rely on food banks and hot meal sites and other service programs regularly or sporadically throughout the year, but so many households are one paycheck, or one car bill or one medical bill away from having to rely on those services.”
For now, he said, the community is coming together.
HOW TO VOLUNTEER OR DONATE
Catholic Community Services of Western Washington
▪ Financial donations accepted online.
▪ Drop off ingredients, prepared grab-and-go meals, food or paper products any day of the week (ideally around 9 a.m., but accepted any time) at Nativity House, 702 S. 14th St., Tacoma. The organization is also in need of new clothing items like underwear, t-shirts and sweats, as well as laundry pods, to-go boxes and hand sanitizer.
▪ Volunteer by emailing Shannon Cline, shannoncl@ccsww.org.
▪ Financial donations accepted online.
▪ Drop off any non-perishable or fresh food (“anything that has not been opened or prepared yet”) at 1323 S. Yakima Ave., Tacoma, 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
▪ Volunteer by emailing Caroline Comfort at carolinec@foodconnection.org, or call 253-383-5048, ext. 2.
▪ Financial donations accepted online.
▪ Drop off any non-perishable or fresh food, sealed and unused, as well as baby food and products like diapers and wipes, at 4218 S. Steele St., Tacoma.
▪ Volunteer by signing up for a specific job and time slot online.
▪ Financial donations accepted online.
▪ Food donations and drives halted until the organization has the capacity to safely sort products.
This story was originally published April 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.