LOCAL AGENCIES HELP

Hunger in Akron ‘probably doubled or tripled’ in March,

Above: Good Samaritan Hunger Center staff and volunteers distribute food at Ed Davis Community Center on April 16, 2020. (Photos: Rosalie Murphy.)

advocates say

words and photos by Rosalie Murphy

Cars snake around the Akron Zoo during the last freezing day of the spring. A dozen volunteers, most in face masks and gloves, arrange food — corn and oranges, yogurt and eggs, Easter bread and Combos — on a long line of tables. Three weeks earlier, this system was brand-new. Now it looks like it’s an old hat.

At 3 pm, two men walk up and collect food on foot. Then the first car rolls in. By 5 pm, 200 households — totaling about 540 people — will have collected food, according to Good Samaritan Hunger Center.

“The need, obviously, in Akron, has probably doubled or tripled,” says Michele Smith, executive director of Good Samaritan Hunger Center, a mobile food pantry that has operated in Akron for almost four decades. Normally, she says, they serve about 280 people at four grocery distributions per week. In midApril, she estimated they were serving as many as 400 people per week at drivethrough distributions. challenges — restrictions on their normal operations and skyrocketing need. Good Samaritan moved from distributing food inside community centers to putting it in trunks in parking lots.

The Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank sends most of the food it collects to smaller neighborhood food pantries, including Good Samaritan. President and CEO Dan Flowers estimates that around 50 of 500 partner sites have stopped operating due to social distancing requirements.

At the same time, they’re distributing 30% more food than this time last year.

“One thing that happened in the month of March — that really stood out to me as a leading indicator about how our lives and worlds have changed — is that the number of new people showing up at food pantries went up a lot,” Dan says. “There was a 109% increase in first-time visitors to our network in March.”

Once a month, the Foodbank opens for individual distributions, where they serve about 400 cars on average. In the first week of April — at a special off-cycle distribution — they served around 1,100. sugarcoat it,” Dan says.

Food pantries are not always easy to access, however. Nearly all require that patrons meet certain income eligibility requirements, and some require referrals from other social service agencies or 211, United Way of Summit County’s allpurpose help line.

But on April 7, the U.S. Department of Agriculture waived most of those requirements to limit contact between patrons and volunteers or staff. Good Samaritan simply asked drive-thru patrons how many people were in their households to get a sense of how many people they served.

“We used to have to sign everybody in; now we’re able to just count households and numbers of people. That’s a huge help. We’re able to maintain good, safe social distance,” Michele says.

Small businesses stepped up to serve families in need, too. Your Pizza Shop on West Exchange Street estimates that it served between 6,500 and 7,000 free meals to kids and families in the month beginning March 16. owner Angelo Gonzales.

“I’m from Buffalo, N.Y, and I remember when I was little, going to school and eating breakfast for free meals and lunch for free meals. On the weekends and [during] summer we’d have free meals at the school. I was raised on this system,” says Angelo Gonzales, founder of Your Pizza Shop. “I was cooking chicken wings and I set some wings in the fryer and I saw that the governor had shut all the schools down, and I immediately thought, ‘how are the kids going to eat?’”

On March 13, Angelo posted on Facebook: “We know and understand that our kids depend on school lunches to have a good meal for the day.. in many cases, it will be their only meal of the day.. If you are going to have trouble with lunches for your children while the schools are closed, or know of someone that is going to need some help with food for their children during this time, please DM us.. we’d like to try our best to help.”

The post was shared nearly 7,000 times. “From there, I guess, with our culture, it brought the community together, and it’s been a very special ride,” Angelo says.