Winterport, Maine (AP) — Phyllis Allen spends her days searching for things. She is looking for potatoes at Sam’s Club, cheap beets and ingers from Walmart, and a local grocery store. She studies weekly inventory from Maine’s only Good Shepherd Food Bankfor great deals on butter and cheese.
Every Monday morning, she shopes at three different stores, keeping a list of prices in her head, and recalling what a particular client wants. On her recent trip to Sam’s Club, she was looking for affordable eggs.
The petite 78-year-old food pantry director discovered them in a huge cooler. Stretched, she pulled two giant boxes out of the shelf above. Seven dozen eggs each, $21 per box. “$2.82 per dozen,” she said. “That’s a good price for the egg.”
The egg was doomed to the cupboard of a neighbor in Winterport, Maine, where Allen had helped run for the past 17 years. Every Wednesday, she and a group of close volunteers provide food packing bags to 25-30 families.
Maine has been around for a long time One of the most unstable states In New England. The food pantries director says the task of making sure people are fed is becoming more difficult because of the decline in food supply, increased demand and overwhelming reliance on volunteers.
About one in seven people in rural Wald County, where their neighbors have their cupboards, was food insecurity in 2023, a rate similar to the state and national averages, according to an analysis of the Associated Press’s U.S. Census Bureau and Supply America Data.
The USDA will do so Stop collecting and releasing statistics on food anxiety Since October, the numbers have been “overly politicized” on September 20th.
Federal cuts are hurting food banks
March, Trump administration Reduces over $1 billion The Emergency Food Aid Program, which provides free food to food banks nationwide from two US Department of Agriculture programs, and the Local Food Purchase Cooperation Agreement Agreement Program, which funds state, territorial and tribal governments to purchase food from local farmers for distribution to starvation relief organizations from local farmers.
“Every month you can see federal food down,” Allen said.
Charitable Food Network is also compensated for $186 billion in cuts Supplementary Nutrition Support Program (SNAP)the federal low-income nutrition program is well known as food stamps. In turn, Feeding America predicts that food pantries will see more demand.
The complex issue is the infrastructure in which the US distributes most of its food to people in need. In Maine, nearly 600 starvation relief agencies rely on volunteers to get free, low-cost food from Good Shepherd Food Bank. This includes 250 food pantry, soup kitchens, senior centers, shelters, schools and youth programs.
According to Good Shepherd, more than 75% of these organizations are completely dependent on volunteers and have no paid staff.
Anna Corsen, co-chairs Maine Advisory Board’s End Hunger, said it’s not just an answer to food insecurity.
“If our goal is to end hunger in Maine, if this is a noble goal, then we’re not going to do that through a volunteer-run charitable food network, right?” she said. “It should be for a crisis situation, but what happened is that it’s just a part of the food system right now, and we shouldn’t.”
The neighbor’s cupboard hummed with activity on a recent Wednesday morning, with cans stacked on a 6-foot-high pile and the child’s collage taped to the cooler.
Keith Richie was greeting his client. And we kept a gentle eye on it to make sure no one had a significant proportion of the limited food. At 89, he is the oldest worker in the pantry, but 88-year-old Betty Williams teases him about the older man.
After working for more than 17 years, Richie said, “I’ve only missed it twice.” He drives 20 miles (32 kilometers) each one way to fill up his groceries, bag him with a “surprise” and donate items like Girl Scout cookies.
“You see a lot of people you know,” he said. “It’s not anyone’s name, but you don’t need a name. You just look at their faces.”
Elderly volunteer workforce
Young volunteers can be more difficult to get than affordable eggs. According to a 2024 report on Maine’s citizen health, roughly 35% of Mainers volunteers are the third highest rate in the nation. But just 20% of Maine’s millennial volunteers, half of the XERS and baby boomers, the same report said.
It’s not a lack of desire to serve, but a hindrance to the way, said researchers at Kixada Moore Bissing, author of the report.
“I classify it as an overwhelmed society and overworked,” Moore Bissing said. “The rising costs of all, especially housing costs, means people have to work more.”
Young volunteers are increasingly hoping for what the Minnesota Alliance of Nonprofit Progression is calling for “event-based” volunteers. Approximately 20% of all volunteers contribute by combining online and in-person work. 2023 Americaorps Survey.
A decrease in the number of volunteers and a move towards one-time engagement can cause serious problems.
Volunteer engagement director Julie Green said Minnesota’s Second Harvest Heartland had to remove thousands of pounds of food in early September.
As a result, food pantry in Minnesota and western Wisconsin has less food to hand out.
Green struggles to bridge the discrepancy between the need for in-person volunteer work like production packers and the occasional increase in desire for services.
“How can we provide more opportunities for one of these volunteers, and then people will be involved with us,” she said.
In her neighbor’s cupboard, Allen said cutting in funding was not the most challenging part of her job. It keeps volunteering, she said, especially because they are older and have health concerns or their families have health concerns.
You need muscle to distribute food. They are reliable and powerful volunteers who can drive long distances in the snow and ice to pick up or deliver heavy food boxes.
A year ago, Allen told a colleague, “Find a chunk with the truck.” When his wife got sick they lost a 78-year-old volunteer. Without a replacement, they have no way to pick up hundreds of pounds of food each week.
Through word of mouth, Allen found one: 67-year-old Brian McClallen. However, just a few months after he started, he needed knee surgery. The staff had to search for a replacement again.
Since March, Maine’s pantry has seen more than half of food cut from Good Shepherd. So far, the neighbor’s cupboard is enough to circulate around as locals donated £5,000 (2,300 kilograms) of food during their May drive. But there is a change.
In late August, Allen received an email from Good Shepherd. Food banks are allowed to separate pantry with low supply from visitors who don’t live nearby due to rising demand.
Allen didn’t have it.
“We will continue to serve everyone,” she wrote in an email to the main monitor.
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AP Data Journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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This report is part of a series called seeding elasticity; collaboration “While Non-Profit News Institute” Country News Network And the Associated Press focused on how rural U.S. communities are navigating the issue of food insecurity. Nine nonprofit newsrooms were involved in the series. beacon, Capital b, Use Latin NC, Investigating the Midwest, Jefferson County Beacon, Cosplay, Public Media in Louisville, Main monitor and Minpost. The Rural News Network is funded by the likes of the Google News Initiative and the Knight Foundation.
The Associated Press School of Health Sciences is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institution’s Department of Science and Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.
