Session Four

Good Food is Good Health

Vandalyn Justice, Social Service Director, The Salvation Army of Charleston Amanda Komorowski, Retail Donation Coordinator, Mountaineer Food Bank Michael Tierney, Executive Director, Step by Step, Inc .

Like the United Way, Catholic Charities, and the Salvation Army, a few organizations in our state provide services that address both health and hunger across the state . How do these services succeed when there’s no centralized infrastructure? How do they know when and where their services are needed? How can we tie the threads together into a tighter safety net?

The Salvation Army provides food, clothing, and utility assistance in seven West Virginia counties, including Boone, Lincoln, Logan Counties. Its Charleston office, which serves Boone and Logan Counties, served food to approximately 900 households, or 1934 individuals, in 2020. That’s impressive, considering its program has a two-person staff.

Like other regional programs, many of the services it provides are in counties where it does not have an office. The West Virginia 2-1-1 referral and information service helps them identify this demand. When the Salvation Army receives many food assistance referrals in Boone County, for example, it will schedule a food distribution delivery in that area. Mobile food pantries have a high overhead cost, and this must be considered when planning food delivery to a remote location. At the start of the pandemic, the Salvation Army’s national program provided food to its state offices for free. But now, the state office must purchase the food, and as panelist Vandy Justice explained, it can “get pricey.” The food itself costs around $4,000-5,000 per distribution. Because the Salvation Army has no “homesite” in Boone or Logan Counties, everything must be shipped there, which increases costs. It’s important to remember that WV 2-1-1 is operated by the United Way and a resource for both organizations and individuals; that’s how they be directed to the Salvation Army. While this resource strives to maintain a comprehensive site of services across the state, if food banks or pantries do not share their information, it is not listed in the 2-1-1 database. And so, the Salvation Army cannot refer its clients to services if it does not know they’re there. It also can’t afford to make regular food shipments to these counties.

In Kanawha County, a community group like the Kanawha Valley Collective brings partners together for

a collaborative approach to address homelessness and hunger. But not every county has such a group. If the WVDHHR had more active staff members in county offices who participated in a collaborative approach such as this, it could refer more clients to local resources, as well as help encourage these small organizations to share their information with the United Way’s 2-1-1 database.

As mentioned in our first session of the series, food banks can also provide programming in needed communities by partnering with pantries in their network of subcontractors. They can help provide targeted programs if there’s a gap in local services. In Boone County, MFB partners with Shepherds Heart Food Pantry for the Feeding Families Prime (FFP) program. The program is a holistic approach to the traditional food pantry and is free for participants, funded by the state, and focuses on clients with preexisting medical conditions. As previously discussed,

much of the food distributed by food banks and pantries are meant for optimal shelf life and can be high in salt and sugars. They’re not always considered healthy foods, and so, this program is a response to the need to ensure more nutritious foods are available, and attendees learn ways to better prepare healthy options and adopt healthier lifestyles. They also receive unconventional educational opportunities, like Naloxone training. Shepherds Heart Food Pantry is in Whitesville, which is in Boone County, with a population of 21,500. And yet, despite COVID-19 restrictions, they’ve had a robust turnout— sometimes nearly 100 attendees. Often participants are also the volunteers who unpack food from the delivery truck. Notably, a program such as this must rely on an extensive community turnout to keep the program sustainable. It takes MFB a day’s trip to travel to Boone County, and planning logistics can be complicated, considering limited internet and cell service in Whitesville. MFB and Shepherds Heart Food Pantry partner with WVU Extension to provide educational materials and speakers. The program’s manager, Amanda Komorowski, said that she is always looking for more partners— especially ones who can provide services needed but not found in the community, such as mental health care, adult literacy services, and utility and housing services. She has funding to help expand a community garden project, but as it often happens, she hasn’t found a community partner.

All of this harkens back to the need to build local, collaborative responses to health and hunger. Much like panelist Michael Tierney said, “A community garden is everyone’s garden and no one’s garden,” many communities are working to respond to their community’s needs. Sometimes they are not communicating and collaborating to ensure that services aren’t duplicated, and programs are working together to refer individuals to each other’s services. For larger organizations like the Salvation Army and the United Way, it’s virtually impossible to refer those who contact them to community-based efforts when they don’t know they’re there.

If done strategically, we could address and prioritize needs. For example, summer feeding programs for students rely on community-based programs to serve as feeding sites. Unfortunately, over the years, the number of these sites has dwindled. Panelists made a few suggestions as to how communities could build better healthy food resource programs on the local level. Programs can utilize the AmeriCorps program, especially AmeriCorps VISTA summer positions. They can also find community partners and apply for grant projects, like mini-grants awarded by Try This West Virginia. This type of project initiates an important dialogue between organizations to identify and prioritize needs and helps them learn to work together.

Embracing the spirit of community engagement is critically important to address health and hunger. Engaging folks who want to volunteer in these efforts— especially adolescents and teens— is a critical piece of the puzzle. As many echoed during the summit series, now more than ever, because of the pandemic, food is more plentiful. What we lack is a collaborative approach that “plugs in” all efforts, large or local, into the same system to advance community health and address food insecurity. If we can unite in this work, we’ll build better bridges between health and hunger down to the local level of our rural communities.