First statewide hunger conference highlights scope of Vermont problem
Toolbox
By MEL HUFF Staff Writer - Published: March 25, 2007
MONTPELIER – More Vermonters are going hungry, and the safety net for the hungry is "fragile," said Joseph Kiefer, the co-founder and education director of Food Works at Two Rivers Center in Montpelier. "It's being kept together by aging volunteers and charity."
That was the consensus at the first statewide annual hunger conference held last week.
Hunger advocates came together to get a sense of the breadth of the problem across the state. And they came away with some sobering facts: The number of people using the Lake Region Senior Center meal site in Orleans has grown by 50 percent since 2002; the Bennington County Meals Program will have to raise more than $120,000 this year to fill the gap between reimbursements and the actual cost of delivering 48,000 meals; and the volunteers who run most of the state's food pantries are having difficulty finding younger people to help them.
These concerns were brought up before the group of 120 volunteers, legislators and state officials from Windham to Franklin counties who gathered Tuesday at "Bridging the Gaps: Taking Action to End Hunger," organized by the Vermont Foodbank in partnership with Food Works, the Vermont Department of Health, the Governor's Task Force on Hunger and Central Vermont Medical Center.
"The face of hunger doesn't look like what you think it does," observed Renée Richardson, who runs the state's Food Stamp program. "You don't know what's going on in your neighbor's house."
Vermonters are sometimes surprised to learn about the extent of hunger, said Gov. James Douglas. Last year, two decades after Gov. Madeleine Kunin appointed a task force on hunger, Douglas created a new one.
"We are doing well economically. A couple of months ago we got an upgrade in our general obligation bond rating. Family income is rising at the rate of 3 1/2 percent a year. The problem," he said at the plenary lunchtime session, "is that the cost of living is rising faster. So we have a growing gap between the resources that our families have and the expense of living in Vermont." The state has one of the highest minimum wages in the country, he noted, "but that's not really the story. It's what you need to make your family's ends meet."
The issue of workers trapped between low wages and Vermont's ever-rising cost of living echoed throughout the conference sessions.
Anne Bales-Mostupanick, who works for BROC (the Bennington/Rutland Opportunity Council), said she sees more of the working poor coming to the food shelf. "If one thing happens – their car breaks down – it throws their budget into a tizzy," she observed.
Robin Rowe, a food shelf volunteer from Pittsford, stressed the need to raise awareness about who the hungry are. She cited a call she got from a donor who asked, "Do you mean people who are working are hungry?"
Renée Richardson, the director of the state's Food Stamp program, questioned basing Food Stamp allotments on the assumption that families will spend about 30 percent of their disposable income on food. "Disposable income for most of us – and especially low-income households – has eroded due to increased costs for food, spikes in housing costs (rent, heating fuel, utilities) and gasoline. It is kind of a domino effect," she explained. "Folks with less disposable income may be spending more like 50 percent on food, leaving even less money for emergencies … That can put pressure on the emergency food distribution network."
Lack of money is a chronic worry for those trying to feed the hungry. Teresa Felix from the Vermont Achievement Center in Rutland talked about the difficulty of providing two meals and a snack for up to 180 children a day on an annual budget of $40,000. Thirty cents of both the 50-cent-per-child allocation for breakfast and the 84-cent-per child allocation for lunch is taken up by the cost of milk, which has to be served in order to qualify for reimbursement. Felix struggles to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, which are seldom served in the children's homes.
Ensuring that the elderly get adequate nutrition presents special problems. The meals delivered by Meals on Wheels are planned to provide a third of the day's nutrition, but because the elderly sometimes skip breakfast and supper, they often get less nutrition than they need. And while Meals on Wheels plays a vital role in delivering food to the elderly, shut-ins sometimes put meals in the freezer rather than eat them because they don't want to eat alone. "Food is a social issue," observed Chris Foster of the Vermont Foodbank.
Between 30 percent and 40 percent of eligible Vermonters are not enrolled in the federal Food Stamp program, the "first line of defense against hunger," as the Governor's Task Force calls it. Ideas for increasing participation ranged from simplifying the application process to overcoming the stigma attached to the program. "Can we re-brand Food Stamps, get the word out that this is good for your family?" Kiefer asked. The conference members noted that Dr. Dynasaur has a huge participation rate and that WIC doesn't carry much stigma.
Speaking at the plenary lunchtime session, Dr. Donald Swartz, medical director of the Vermont Department of Health and chairman of the Governor's Task Force on Hunger, looked back over the 20 years since the first task force was formed and compared data gathered then with data gathered by the current task force.
The size of the population is about the same, he said, but today's population is older and more Vermonters are living near or below the poverty line. Swartz estimated the proportion of hungry families to be about the same – he said it's hard to tell because of changing federal standards for collecting data – but the state now has a highly efficient food bank and has seen a dramatic increase in the number of food shelves and meal sites. It's not clear whether the greater number of people served means there are more hungry people than 20 years ago or that access to food has improved, he said.
"Hunger is much more pervasive than I realized," Swartz declared. "The problem is so entrenched and so complex. It involves not just the poor but an awful lot of the middle class who just can't stretch their budget to cover an adequate diet." He speculated that one of the reasons so many people who are eligible for Food Stamps refuse to sign up for the program is that they think, "If everybody else can provide for themselves and I can't, what does that say about me?
He called the assembled volunteers and staff the state's greatest resource for addressing hunger. "Don't be overcome by the burden of the problem," he told them. "The burden belongs to all of us."
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