Volunteers with big hearts fill empty stomachs

Food insecurity is a struggle for many in Southwest Iowa, and the problem was exacerbated in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic. Volunteers with the Creston Area Food Pantry, Creston Food Shelf, One in Christ and Food Bank of Iowa have been working together to make sure no one in Union County goes hungry.

“I believe that there’s more people who would take advantage of the food pantry if it wasn’t for the negative comments that happen here, there and everywhere,” said Creston Area Food Pantry volunteer and board member Carol Westlake. “But that fact just breaks my heart when people don’t think any further than the stigma.”

Tami Nielson, vice president of partners and programs for the Food Bank of Iowa, also said there is an unjustified stigma attached to accepting help with food insecurity.

“There is a stigma involved and we’re trying to diminish that as best we can. That’s one of the ways the pandemic has heightened food insecurity where people in Iowa realize that, yes, right here in our state we do have food insecure people and a lot of them are children,” Nielsen said. “We always say if you want to pay your utility bills, pay your rent, buy your medicine, we can help with the food. We want people to live a healthy and safe life and they need to have food of high nutritional value to do that. We’re just neighbors helping neighbors.”

“The food insecurity number doubled for individuals and tripled for families,” Nielsen said. “We served 21.2 million pounds in 2020, which was a 23 percent increase overall from 2019. That’s 220,000 more individuals.”

Kathy Goodrich, president of the pantry’s board of directors, said she’s noticed a decrease of people who need food coming to the pantry since the start of the pandemic. They were serving over 100 people weekly pre-covid, but now about 50-60. She said she believes fear of covid deterred many of their regulars, but that those numbers are coming back up slowly as the pandemic draws to a close.

The food pantry is located at 417 Wyoming Ave. in the basement of the O’Reilly Center. The building was purchased and donated to the community by Mark and Mary O’Reilly about four years ago.

It is open from noon to 2 p.m every Sunday. Members of various groups such as churches, the Boy Scouts and the Lions’ Club take turns volunteering to help set up and distribute food to the clients in need. Sunday it was First Baptist Church.

Volunteers from First Baptist included Stacie Bolton and her husband Kevin, who recently moved back to Creston from the Washington D.C. area.

“We just moved back to town about a year ago, so I’m getting involved with the community,” Bolton said.

Westlake said most of their food that is perishable such as dairy, meat and produce comes from local stores such as Fareway and Walmart. Much of it is food that’s still edible but close to the sell-by date. Most of the non-perishable canned and boxed goods come from the Food Bank of Iowa in Des Moines.

The pantry has a chest freezer full of two pound venison packages processed at Zeb’s Smokehouse in Bedford. The meat was donated through the Iowa DNR’s Help Us Stop Hunger program. In the 2020-2021 deer season, hunters donated over 49,000 pounds of venison to HUSH. Westlake said their clients love the deer meat.

Martha Musmeker is another volunteer on the pantry’s board of directors. She said retired from her job as a nurse about 20 years ago.

“This gives me at least as much joy as helping people when they were sick,” Musmeker said while explaining what food they have and how it’s organized. “The shelves were donated by Farm and Home in Mount Ayr when they went out of business. Oh my, what a wonderful gift that holds so much heavy stuff. That juice is heavy.”

Goodrich said the Elk’s Club received a $5,000 grant this year. She said they used a significant portion of it to buy food from Hy-Vee and Fareway.

“And at Walmart they bought us all kinds of diapers, personal items, deodorant, toothpaste, all that kind of stuff. So that was very helpful because otherwise we purchase it ourselves out of our own funds,” Goodrich said.

Mark O’Reilly runs the Creston Food Shelf, which gets meals to children to supplement the school lunch program. The food shelf made Easter baskets for them too. Twice a month they deliver food to elderly and handicapped individuals who are unable to leave their homes. He said that through the Food Shelf they provided food to 785 individuals in April.

“I’ve got a wonderful group of volunteers that help me fill the bags to take to the school,” O’Reilly said.

Nielsen said the Des Moines based Food Bank of Iowa is one of six Feeding America food banks in the state. Hers is by far the largest, serving 650 partner organizations in 55 central Iowa counties stretching from Minnesota to Missouri. She said being in Iowa enables the food bank to procure a great deal of meat and dairy to clients as well as vegetables, especially around fall harvest time.

“We get a lot of ham. We’re in Iowa, we have a lot of pork. There’s always good protein on inventory,” she said. “In the summertime there are a lot of great farmers who will donate to us or donate directly to our pantry partners so that they have sweet corn… We have a lot of pasta. Barilla is a wonderful donor to the Food Bank of Iowa.”

Barilla, the largest pasta producer in the world, is an Italian based food company that has been operating one of its two major pasta production plants in Ames since 1998.

Despite the abundance of protein and pasta, some other food items have been more elusive during the pandemic.

“What’s been hard during the pandemic is canned fruit. That’s something that’s been harder to come by,” Nielsen said. “I know that some of it had to do with the manufacturing of cans.”

She said food donations and food drives are always appreciated, but monetary donations are even better because the food bank gets wholesale pricing and often better deals as a non-profit.

“We can buy about four meals with $1,” Nielsen said. “We can really stretch that donor dollar a lot farther than the donor themselves can.”

Westlake said volunteers with the Food Bank of Iowa bring a truckload with 6,000-8,000 pounds of food twice a month.

“It’s almost hard to believe, but they can unload all that in about half an hour,” Westlake said.

Becky Riley is chairman of the One in Christ organization. It’s an ecumenical group of Christian churches in the Creston area that helps provide food and school supplies to children in need.

“When the school meals are over for summer, the churches pick that up and take it to the rest of the summer until school starts again so the kids always have an opportunity to get a lunch somewhere in town. And the churches just kind of divide up the days,” Riley said.

Last summer during the pandemic they ran the program for six weeks because the school ended its program earlier than usual, so this summer it will only be the first three weeks of August. She said on average they feed 100-150 kids per day via a drive-through at the United Methodist Church.

Riley said One in Christ was originally started about 2010 as the backpack mission to provide school supplies and the lunch program expansion occurred a few years after that. Several people in several other counties were inspired by her group’s work and started their own backpack programs.

“This summer we’re doing 275. We used to do 650 so 275 doesn’t feel like so much,” Riley said. “We want them off to a good start so they can have the learning opportunities, instead of worrying about not having what they need.”