Food For The Soul

Our neighbors are hungry. As the pandemic brings unemployment, more locals are food insecure and relying on the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank. We speak to people in this position for the first time and those helping reduce hunger.

It’s two weeks before Thanksgiving, but Tina Soltis isn’t thinking about a turkey dinner.

Instead, she’s sitting in her black Jeep in a line of cars backed up nearly a mile to Main Street, awaiting a 2 p.m. Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank distribution on Nov. 12, and is thinking about how she is going to keep her car.

Her 43-year-old husband, reclining in the seat next to her, was laid off from his factory job. He couldn’t get unemployment because he was in and out of the hospital for two months with cancer. Ever since, Soltis, a 67-year-old retiree, has been making calls to search for ways to support them and his 7- and 9-year-old kids.

She came to the foodbank for the first time in October, and she laments that she’s this close to losing her car, phone and home — everything. Getting this food means there is one less stressor.

“It’s a godsend. When I came here last month, I had nothing,” she says, adding that they were just eating toast since the fridge and cupboards were empty.

When it’s finally time, Ohio National Guardsmen in military fatigues and a flurry of masked volunteers direct seven cars into four lanes each between rows of massive food boxes. When everyone is in place and trunks are popped, volunteer Dennis Jordan puts a produce box in a couple’s trunk and volunteer Norma Jordan brings over two turkeys. I’m gonna get some muscles today, she jokes. Other volunteers follow, placing a marketplace bag, a 26-pound emergency dry food box, two half-gallons of milk and masks in the car.

After just three minutes, 28 cars are full, and drivers begin departing. Volunteers say, Happy Thanksgiving, while drivers shout, Thank you, out rolled-down windows. Over two hours, more than 1,100 families receive much-needed food.

Need Help?

Call the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank at 855-560-0850.

Visit the foodbank’s website for a list of partner grocery or hot meal distribution programs in Carroll, Holmes, Medina, Portage, Stark, Summit, Tuscarawas or Wayne counties.

Go to the foodbank’s Akron facility at 350 Opportunity Parkway for drive-thru grocery distribution two Thursdays a month.

Katie Carver Reed, the director of network partners and programs for the foodbank, works every drive-thru and has met several other first-time foodbank visitors like Soltis. She recounts a story of spouses who became unemployed. “She started crying. She said, My husband and I work multiple jobs, so we can try to make ends meet for ourselves and our kids. It hurts so much to be here right now,” Carver recalls. “That’s indicative of so many stories I’ve heard of people that were working hard and were just getting by. It wasn’t easy for them before the pandemic, but that loss of jobs changes everything for their entire family.”

Stats back that up. Unemployment went from 4 percent to around 10 percent in Ohio, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Poverty went from around 13 percent to a projected 14 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Urban Institute respectively. “That causes an explosion of people who need food,” says foodbank president and CEO Dan Flowers.

In Summit County alone, 93,660 people are food insecure, according to projected 2020 stats from Feeding America — a 31 percent increase in need caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those numbers are also high across the seven other counties the foodbank serves, including increases of 47 percent in Medina and 30 percent in Stark. That rise spans young adults to seniors.

“No demographic has been spared — the increase in need has affected everyone,” Carver says.

More than 60 percent of the 1,200 families who visited the first drive-thru distribution on March 26 were first-time Akron-Canton foodbank clients. Staffers had 10 days to prep for a spike in need, but the endless barrage of people who arrived was more devastating than they had ever witnessed.

“I remember crying on my way home. I was overwhelmed by the need,” Carver says. “I was overwhelmed thinking about how they were feeling, ‘cause I know what it feels like.”

Master Sgt. Daniel Fortney, of the Ohio National Guard’s 1st Battalion 145th Armored Regiment, has served in the Iraq War. Other members of his Stow-based Battalion recently returned from a yearlong assignment training military allies in Kuwait.

But in March, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine gave Fortney orders to deploy his troops a few cities away to serve in the battle against the coronavirus for Operation Steady Resolve. On March 23, Fortney and 30 soldiers and airmen arrived at their new station: the Akron-Canton foodbank.

The reinforcements came at a critical time. Since March 16, Flowers’ team members had been tirelessly working nights and weekends to redo their model for social distancing.

“Every person found themselves as this newly defined concept of an essential worker,” Flowers says. “We all just had to dig deep and say we’re going no matter what.”

Right away, the foodbank upped distributions from once a month indoors to the drive-thrus two or three times a month. It gives out a small portion of its food at those, since its main function is storing food. Its 500 or so hunger relief partners with hot meal and pantry programs at churches, shelters and more distribute the bulk of its inventory.

Following the lockdown, foodbank staffers called partners and were met with unfortunate news: 70 programs paused service and 11 partners operating 19 programs permanently closed. Most were run by older volunteers who are vulnerable to the coronavirus, so they shut down for safety reasons.

Each closure meant less food distributed and more service gaps in communities. Programs that stayed open were getting slammed.

Immediately, program manager Lajoyce Harris saw a surge in need at the Center of Hope in Ravenna, a meal and pantry site that is a part of Family and Community Services. From March 15 to 18, emergency grocery orders spiked to 49, to-go meals skyrocketed to 913 and volunteers dropped from 25 to seven.

Despite the strain, the center never stopped service.“The passion and drive that we had before the shutdown never declined. It increased tremendously,” she says. “There was no time for fear. It was just time to serve.”

People are usually enjoying hot lunches in the Center of Hope’s dining room, but on Nov. 5, the tabletops are buried under boxes of insulated to-go bowls, crates of canned corn and boxes of cereal, all stacked to the ceiling. A few volunteers are running boxed-up meals of breaded chicken, potatoes, Brussels sprouts and mixed fruit to people waiting in cars.

To keep up with demand, the center boosted its foodbank pickups from a single 1,000-pound order to three orders of food per week. Hunger relief partners typically pick up food from the foodbank, so that increase required a lot of manpower when volunteers were already sparse.

Just a week after the shutdown, Guardsmen began packing food boxes six days a week and using their five hulking camo-painted Light Medium Tactical Vehicles or box trucks to do about 100 food deliveries to partners a month. This lifted a burden off the center, but the Guard couldn’t deliver there every time. In August, when the center’s truck broke, workers put out a desperate plea for help with transportation on Facebook. Local company Sirna & Sons Produce answered the call and delivered the food.

Time after time, kind acts built up to fill needs at the center. Kent State University students volunteered to pack food, Guido’s Pizza & Catering donated hot Italian meals to give kitchen staff a break and veterans from the VFW Post 1055 made a monetary donation. Every bit helped meet needs as they arose.

As more have lost jobs and gotten sprung into poverty, repercussions rippled throughout other areas of families’ lives too.

With school closures so abrupt, families getting subsidized lunches and breakfasts were missing 10 meals a week per child. Some city systems, like Akron Public Schools, set up distribution sites, but rural communities often lacked that emergency response and transportation was also an issue.

On top of feeding kids, Harris has met some families that have lost houses and moved in with each other. Some household sizes have ballooned to six or even 10 people.

“We heard stories from the head of the household: I don’t have a job now, so my wife has to get another job and maybe some children. Not only do I have to take care of my family but now I have extended family that were impacted by COVID,” Harris says, adding that the center gives extra food to help larger households.

Harris has also seen a peak in older adults needing assistance for the first time because they could no longer get help from family due to health issues or a loss of income.

Ravenna resident Nancy Hanko was at the center’s Nov. 5 hot meal service and started receiving food from the center in April — her first time ever using a food pantry. Her son and 83-year-old sister would help her with groceries. But in March, her son wasn’t working and had six kids at home, so he stopped coming, and it was difficult to get to stores. As Hanko’s pantry items were dwindling, a friend recommended that she go to the center.

Sitting in the center’s box-laden dining room, she recalls getting her first food delivery of hot dogs, chili, rice, fruit, liquid eggs, cheese and more. She says it was new and scary. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says.

Hanko’s now comfortable and is very thankful. “It meant a lot,” she says, looking down. “I didn’t have any food.”

It began with just a stick of butter and a half-gallon of milk in the fridge. And while a 7-year-old Carver and her three siblings ate dinner in their Canton home growing up, her mom didn’t have a plate. Her mom worked at a small restaurant and her dad worked at Pizza Hut, but his addiction strained the family’s finances. Her mom’s boss started to notice she was struggling, so she sent home leftovers, as did her dad’s. While eating Pizza Hut daily sounds fun for a kid, to Carver, all those nights having nothing but pizza were a bitter reminder of their poverty and the constant state of panic they lived in.

“I would go to a friend’s house and see a full fridge, and it didn’t seem like they were worried about anything. Then I came home, and we didn’t have electric because my mom couldn’t pay the bill,” Carver recalls.

Eventually, her dad’s addiction got so bad, he left the house and later became homeless. Her mom turned to food stamps, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and food pantries to get by.

Hunger pangs were devastating, but even more painful was how people treated Carver. “I did have kids say mean things to me,” she says. “That stigma deeply lives within me. It’s still uncomfortable sometimes to talk about. I’m afraid of how people will judge me or judge my mom — because they do. We’re not nice to each other as a society. It was the reason I pursue the work I do because I know what it feels like — it hurts.”

Carver’s on a mission to restore dignity. She created a trail-blazing initiative, the Voices Project, which lets clients give feedback. Open M Ministries in Akron participated, and clients said that when the line has stretched out the door, they’ve gotten soaked in bad weather. The foodbank used that input to build an awning to shield clients from rain or snow.

Harris also regularly seeks feedback. One man in his 40s commented that pulling up to the building off of busy state Route 59 for curbside pickups was embarrassing because he worked all of his life and never needed help before. So Harris showed him a spot in the back parking lot instead.

These changes help remove anxiety from the foodbank experience. “When people come to us, they’re struggling, they’re upset. We want to make their day better — not worse,” Carver says. “I learned from my struggles how important it is to get to know people and to treat them with love and kindness.”

The drive-thru distributions go by at lightning speed, but taking small moments to interact with clients softens their worst days. Carver smiled at how a fellow employee brought treats for people with dogs in their cars and how the Akron Symphony Orchestra played music to entertain drivers.

During one distribution, Carver noticed a boy in a car intently looking at something, and his mom said it was Guardsmen because he wanted to be a soldier. Carver asked one to come over and say hello. “His eyes just lit up,” she says. Those exchanges help put overwhelmed first-timers at ease. “They realize they don’t have to be tough. We’re here to help them and be in it with them.”

The stigma of hunger could be what’s holding someone back from getting help. Harris encountered a client who was down to his very last grocery and called late on a September day to say he urgently needed food. She made sure he got it, but she wondered how he fed himself until then. She takes those opportunities to encourage people, so they come back and don’t wait until they are starving. “He’s not doing anything wrong,” Harris says. “You need to feed your family.”

Not even 10 minutes into the Nov. 12 drive-thru, Soltis’ husband pulls her car up to receive the food that will help the couple further stretch their $194 in food stamps for themselves and his two kids. It frees up more of the $292 that’s left from Soltis’ Social Security after paying rent for other critical bills, like her car. Her husband already lost his truck.

“I don’t wanna lose my car,” she says. “We need it to get here. I’ve got doctor’s appointments, and with his cancer, he’s got to keep going.” So after this, she will be on the phone again, seeking help.

As volunteers load food into her car, a burden is taken off for a moment. They tell her she’s got a turkey, and she does something that’s rare these days — smiles.

“I’m really happy we are getting it because we weren’t going to have one,” she says, adding that now they can celebrate the holidays.

Providing for holiday celebrations is perhaps one of the most dignifying ways the foodbank can help. It will give out meals for Christmas at its Dec. 22 drive-thru. The Center of Hope is delivering Christmas food baskets and toys Dec. 12. Getting food and gifts gives families a pathway to partake in the joy of the season and not get left out because of poverty or food insecurity.

“I believe it brings them some peace,” Harris says.

Carver’s family used to receive a turkey from the Salvation Army. Soon, a new Canton foodbank facility will open late next year near where she grew up, and she will be working on the other side of that line.

For years, the foodbank’s inventory has outgrown storage space in its 80,000-plus-square-foot Akron facility. The Stark County facility will add over 40,000 square footage of space and will make it easier for pantries in surrounding counties to pick up food orders, especially as the National Guard leaves at the end of this year and the ongoing pandemic limits volunteers. To fill that hole, getting more volunteers next year is crucial, as is fundraising, which has been harder during the pandemic.

The drive-thrus continue to draw over 1,000 families each month, and Flowers knows that demand isn’t going down anytime soon. “There have been long-term detrimental impacts on people’s lives,” he says.

While it may be difficult for newcomers to see, Carver is a testament to the possibility of rising out of poverty. “Growing up, I didn’t always think I could attain much. That’s why I try to talk about my own experience,” she says. “I hope that may help them feel whatever struggles they’re going through now won’t last forever.”

The smallest things added up for her: pizzas sent home, scholarships for school trips, a donation for their family’s electric bill and regular visits to the foodbank. There’s no shame in getting help. If anything, it’s what propelled her out of poverty. As the cars keep coming, she’s looking for ways to remove barriers and drive that home to each family.

“We have that responsibility to err on the side of kindness. Because the way we treat people could be the difference between getting food and not getting food,” she says. “Pride is in all of us, egos and fears. The more we can break those down to show love and kindness, the better off we are.”

The Stats

• 31% increase in food insecurity in our region due to COVID-19
• 43% increase in food insecure children in our region due to COVID-19
• 1,800 + families at the foodbank’s drive-thru distribution in April, the most to date
• 253,410 people are food insecure in our region, up 60,460 people from last year
• 30+% more people are using foodbank programs in our region for the first time