Bethany Garfield - Food Pantry Coordinator

I run the Mustard Seed Food Pantry at the Community Center of St. Bernard and this will be my first blog post on the FFON site. For those of you who have been following the Community Center, you may already know some of the challenges we face in our efforts to feed families in need. For the newcomers, I’m just going to recap briefly what it is we do at the pantry and how we do it.

Every week, we have three food distribution days when households with an income that is less than 130% below the US poverty level can come and receive food. Unfortunately, we have a large amount of people who fit these criteria – we have an average of about 450 households that come each month. This means that every day we are serving at least 60 people, on Tuesday and Thursday the amount of clients we see is closer to 100.

Recently, we experienced a food shortage because our main provider, Second Harvest, suffered a 2.5 million dollar budget cut. Their loss became ours as well, since at the time that this occurred, 99% of our food came from them. Luckily, we found ways to work around this – we started the FFON site, enabling us to start food drives in the Greater New Orleans area. We also started a Food For Seniors program, which provided people over 60 who met the income criteria to receive a 40 pound box of food from the USDA every third week of the month instead of from our pantry, thus allowing us to have more food for other people. Luckily, we were able to make it through the shortage using these methods and more, along with the generosity of those who donated food during this time. These days, it’s looking like Second Harvest may be making a recovery, but every day is different and we still need all the help we can get.