Food pantry needs rise as school year ends

Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive

Where: All of Butler County

When: May 11

What: Leave a canned good or two next to your mailbox and your letter carrier will pick it up. All food collected by the letter carriers will be delivered to Fairfield-based Shared Harvest Food Bank, which distributes food to its network of five counties.

Other: Volunteers are needed to help from 1 to 6:30 p.m. at the various post offices. Contact Shared Harvest at 800-352-3663 to volunteer.

Thousands of Butler County residents go hungry every year, and since the near economic collapse more than five years ago, that number has steadily rose.

Every spring, the National Association of Letter Carriers attempts to help reduce the pressure food pantries have with depleting supplies. A couple hundred thousand letter carriers will pick up cans of food left out by mail boxes and donate them to local food pantries.

And as school meal programs end when summer breaks start, NALC’s Stamp Out Hunger coordinator Pam Donato said “the timing of the food drive is important.”

“We could not achieve these results without the contributions of our national and local sponsors, the assistance of those groups that help our branches collect the food, and the generosity of our postal customers,” she said.

Hunger affects around 50 million people in this country every year, and that includes 17 million children and 9 million seniors. Since 1992, the nation’s largest single-day food drive has netted 1.2 billion pounds of food for pantries.

Locally, the letter carriers have collected nearly 1.1 million pounds of food since it started in 1995 in Butler County, said Tina Osso, director of the Shared Harvest Food Bank.

“That’s a pretty generous outpouring of love for our neighbors,” Osso said. “And that’s really what food is, it’s a way for us to show that we care about one another.”

“This is a wise investment of food,” Osso said. “These are investments of food in our human capital to improve our condition.”

Butler County resident Fred Moore, 39, lost his job March 22. He now receives benefits from the county through Job and Family Services.

The pantry has made it easier on him and his two daughters, ages 16 and 19, who live part-time with the single dad.

“It’s one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made, but it was the right one,” Moore said. “I have to take care of (my daughters) the best I can.”

He initially was embarrassed to seek the help of the pantry, but Moore said it “took a lot of stress off me. Nobody wants to look at their children and not be able to feed them. No man wants to go through that.”

The May 11 food drive helps restock some of the barren shelves at food pantries around the county.

Maurice Maxwell, director of Family Services of Middletown, said his pantry has seen about a 30 percent increase of people being served from 2011-2012.

“And we’re seeing that pace holding for the first part of 2013, but we are seeing a number of first-timers,” he said. “We are seeing some people who have been unemployed, but they are now in positions of being underemployed … They can’t quite make ends meet.”

The pantry serves about 900 clients a month, and around 40 percent are first-time clients, Maxwell said.

Serve City pantry director Glenna Carroll said in April 738 families were served, and 88 of those families were new. That, however, is a bit lower than the average of 100 new families a month that come to the pantry on East Avenue in Hamilton.

“It got better for a while, then it steadily has gotten worse (since the economic collapse),” she said. “Some people would come in once in a while, and now they’re coming in every month.”

Since January, more than 2,800 families have been served by the pantry.

Shared Harvest serves Butler, Warren, Preble, Miami and Darke counties. From 2007 to 2011, the most recent five years worth of complete yearly data from Shared Harvest, Butler County families that needed assistance rose by nearly 28 percent.

“Periodically we see folks come back because they are living so close to the vest that when anything happens (such as illness, a car repair, or a child needs new shoes), we’ll see them back,” Osso said. “And the new people that are coming in are people who have just exhausted everything and it’s the typical story — they’ve been long-term unemployed, they’ve maxed out their credit cards, they’re going through foreclosures — and find themselves standing there in a food pantry line.”