Need and Response
I had a call last week from a man in Muncie who had received one of our Thanksgiving mailings. He lives in a retirement community. He had a couple of questions and wanted to tell me something. Is it true, he asked, that you can provide a meal for a dollar? Well, I said, we can provide enough pounds of food for five meals for a dollar! How can you do that he queried?
I was sitting at my desk in the construction trailer I use for an office. It is parked inside our warehouse so I described what I saw out my window. We have racks and racks of food here in our central warehouse, I told him, more than 700,000 pounds. We bring it in from all over the United States. It is donated food that costs us, on a good day, 20 cents a pound to find, transport, store and deliver to pantries and meal programs serving people in need. At 20 cents a pound, and with a meal weighing a pound to a pound and a half, we can translate this bulk food into meals and provide five meals for a dollar.
Well, he said, I am going to send you $100. How many meals will that make? Five hundred, I confirmed. Now, he said, let me tell you something. I came through the Depression the hard way. My family got food baskets at Thanksgiving and Christmas. He told me he was retired from Ball State University and that he wanted to help others as he had been helped.
I thought it revealing that he called with his story the week we were all stunned by the losses on Wall Street. I’m sure the situation along with our mailing brought memories of hard times flooding into this man’s mind. It was good to know that a man who had made it through the depression was willing to reach out to help others in economic distress.
Pantries are reporting a greater number of clients than ever before. Our Tailgate Program has longer and longer lines in each of the eight counties Second Harvest Food Bank serves. At our booth at Edgewater Park in Anderson this past Saturday, we ran out of pantry lists before we ran out of balloons.
I shook hands with U.S. Rep. Mike Pence last week in Yorktown, where we celebrated new jobs. I hugged state Rep. Terri Austin this weekend in Elwood, where Red Gold sponsored a chili cook-off. A staff member met with a community services group in Anderson and a like group in New Castle while another staffer went to a similar meeting in Marion during the week. Two of us drove to Portland for a meeting with United Way on Friday.
We hear the same stories wherever we go. The need is high. Resources are low. But we see the resolve in the eyes of those with whom we speak. They plan to make a difference and we plan to help.