INCREASING NEED

Collaboration, cooperation in Johnson County could be example for sustainability

By Emily Andersen, The Gazette

Edith Chase has been relying on food pantries in order to eat for the past six months. As a retiree with a fixed income from Social Security, she hasn’t been able to keep up with the increasing cost of food and other expenses. She started visiting pantries occasionally last year, and in the last six months she increased her visits to once or twice a week.

Still, she finds herself regularly skipping meals or eating small portions in order to stretch what she has.

Chase, a Cedar Rapids resident, used to get her food mostly from Olivet Neighborhood Mission, which was the largest food pantry in Linn County until it closed at the end of August. The Hawkeye Area Community Action Program announced plans to purchase the pantry

location and turn it into a resource hub with a pantry, but has not released a timeline for that project.

After Olivet announced in July that it would be closing, Chase started going to Together We Achieve, the next largest pantry in the county and the next closest to her house. On Aug. 28, Together We Achieve announced that unless they could raise $50,000, it also would be closing at the beginning of September.

“I was here that day when they announced it. I was first in line that day, and totally devastated,” Chase said.

The pantry launched an emergency fundraiser, and was able to meet its $50,000 goal 15 days after making the announcement. As of Wednesday, the pantry had raised $52,809.92, and Raymond Siddell, the executive director of Together We Achieve, said he knows of additional donations made through a corporate portal that the pantry will be receiving soon.

Siddell said the newly raised funds should get the pantry through the end of this year. In the meantime, he’s hoping to find new funding sources and work on improving collaborative efforts with other agencies and pantries in the county.

“I heard they got the funding that meant they could stay open through the end of the year, but that doesn’t say anything about next year,” Chase said. “Right now, I’m not getting my hopes built up because I may have to be finding someplace else in January.”

Robert Cannon has been visiting Together We Achieve twice a week for about three years, ever since he was forced to retire early after multiple strokes.

He gets $791 per month from retirement and has five family members to feed besides himself. It simply isn’t enough.

“I used to be a mechanic for the DOT, and my base pay was $65 an hour. To go from $65 an hour to $791 a month, we really had to cut back on everything.”

Cannon, of Cedar Rapids, visits other pantries in the city from time to time, but Together We Achieve has been his most reliable source of food. Most of the other pantries in Linn County are smaller, with fewer hours of availability and less variety. The hardest food staples to find are perishables such as meat, dairy and fresh fruits and vegetables, he said.

Like Chase, Cannon said if Together We Achieve closes, he doesn’t know where he would go for reliable options.

While many patrons still are using food pantries as a supplemental source of food, the number of people like Chase and Cannon who rely on pantries as their primary food source has been growing. On a local and national scale, food pantries and other food-based nonprofits are being overwhelmed with increasing need, and many, like Olivet, have been unable to keep up.

Together We Achieve, which got its start in 2020 as a Facebook group meant to connect people with resources after the derecho, has seen demand grow at its food pantry in southwest Cedar Rapids. In 2022, the pantry served 6,192 people from 1,694 different households. In 2023, those numbers climbed to 7,370 people served from 1,995 households. In total, since 2020, the pantry has distributed 1,974,096 pounds of food.

Siddell and other community food providers are worried that without better collaborative efforts between pantries and increased support from local government, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to access food in Linn County.

WHY IS NEED INCREASING?

The increase in need stems from a variety of factors, including rising costs for food related to inflation, a decrease in government programs that previously supported those facing financial difficulty, and limited funding available from grants and donations.

Kim Guardado is the Food Reservoir Director for the Hawkeye Area Community Action Program, or HACAP, which operates a food bank that supplies food to pantries across Eastern Iowa. She said HACAP first started seeing a jump in requests for assistance from its pantry partners in 2022, after emergency food stamp benefits that had been in place during the COVID- 19 pandemic ended in Iowa.

Since then, the increase in need has been slower, but is climbing consistently, according to Guardado.

“One of the things that’s putting pressure on us is the cost of food,” Guardado said. “To solve some of the issues that we’re currently facing, we have to get the cost of food down so that people can buy their own food, or so that pantries are more easily able to purchase food for the people they serve.”

As the needs and costs have increased, some of the organizations that provided funding for food pantries in the past have had to adjust their funding priorities.

Before announcing its emergency fundraiser in August, Siddell said Together We Achieve had applied for $127,000 in grant funding in six months. Almost all of those requests were denied. Feedback from some of the granting organizations indicated that they’re overwhelmed with requests for food-related funding, so they’re trying to focus on programs that will create long-term solutions rather than only treating the immediate need the way pantries do.

“Bigger change needs to happen, and we want to be a part of those conversations,” Siddell said. “In the interim, people still need to be fed, and without pantries like ours, it’s going to have a very negative impact on our community.”

The Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, a nonprofit that collects funds to distribute to other organizations in the area, is currently reviewing applications for its second round of grant funding this year. During the first round of grants this year, the foundation received two funding requests related to food insecurity and granted one of them — $25,000 to Matthew 25 in Cedar Rapids.

This fall, the foundation received eight requests — totaling $174,784 — related to food insecurity. That’s more than was requested by food organizations during both 2023 funding rounds combined. The funding decisions for this round will be announced in December.

“Our mandate here at the Community Foundation is to serve our entire community. So certainly, the housing crisis and food insecurity are high in our minds, but we’re also focusing on education, and arts and culture, and environmental protection, and really trying to fund across the entire nonprofit sector,” said Joe Heitz, vice president of community impact for the Community Foundation.

LINN COUNTY NEEDS COLLABORATION

Between now and the end of the year, Together We Achieve will be working to find more longterm funding solutions in order to stay open come January. Siddell said this includes putting out more grant and funding applications, but also looking at how the pantry can work more closely with other Linn County organizations to relieve the pressure that individual organizations are facing.

“The systemic change that I think we need to see is a cohort of pantry professionals that have a passion for food insecurity and the community,” Siddell said. “When we’re all out doing our own thing, that makes it really challenging to ensure that people are being served in a way that they, one, deserve to be served, and then two, in a way that is the most efficient and effective for the dollars that we raise.”

The food pantry system in Linn County is “fragmented,” according to Siddell. There are a lot of small pantries that are open for a few hours each week, but there isn’t a process in place to make sure all hours or all areas of the city are covered.

HACAP tries to keep track of hours and accessibility around the county and works with new organizations who want to create a pantry to ensure they’re not overlapping with services that already exist, but the most the food bank can do is make recommendations, which may or may not be followed, according to Guardado.

“We'd love to see the city and the county get involved in some of these solutions. We'd love to see an opportunity for nonprofits and faithbased organizations to work together to provide more access to families in the community. I think partnerships, and that private-public partnership, is really the key to make this successful, for this to happen,” Guardado said.

Linn County has contributed funds to food organizations. In 2023, the county launched a Food Access, Resiliency and Equity program that distributed $250,000 in American Rescue Plan Act dollars in two grant cycles. The grants — between $1,000 and $25,000 each — were spread among a variety of organizations. Applicants could include farmers, processors, packagers, distributors, grocers, educators, administrators, social service agencies, nonprofits, food pantries, restaurants, food entrepreneurs and food innovators. The program was intended to fill gaps in the county food system.

Emmaly Renshaw is the Director of Land Access for Feed Iowa First, a Linn County nonprofit that works with local farmers to grow and deliver fresh vegetables to food pantries in the county. The nonprofit also operates a small veggie van, which distributes vegetables at a few locations around Linn County on a weekly basis.

Since Olivet closed in August, Renshaw said more people are coming to the veggie van, and a load that used to take 30 to 45 minutes to distribute is now being cleared out 15 minutes after the van arrives.

“I have not heard a lot of conversation about what happens if another large pantry closes, but looking at a systems perspective, I firmly believe it will be a domino effect. I don’t think these smaller pantries can take the brunt force,” Renshaw said.

“What would be left is a quilt work of library pantries and school pantries and religious pantries,” Renshaw said. “They’re phenomenal people who are doing the work, but they’re stressed … They’re lacking funding, they’re lacking volunteers, and they’re lacking the ability to have their doors open to serve.”

JOHNSON COUNTY RELIES ON COLLABORATION, GOVERNMENT SUPPORT

Renshaw pointed to Johnson County as an example of a community system that Linn County organizations could emulate, There, government support and collaborative systems that were already in place have helped local pantries weather the increase in demand.

Johnson County, like Linn County, has small food pantries scattered throughout different neighborhoods in the community. But unlike Linn County, it also has three large pantries that are the major providers of food for most people in need — the Coralville Community Food Pantry, the North Liberty Community Food Pantry and the CommUnity Crisis Services and Food Bank in Iowa City.

Although the three pantries are technically in competition with each other when it comes to requesting funding, they regularly meet and work together to ensure that the resources they each have are being used in the most effective way.

“We want all the food pantries that exist to be strong and healthy so that they can meet the needs in their local communities. If they don’t, then those families are ending up at our doorstep, so the burden is shifted,” said Ryan Bobst, executive director of the North Liberty pantry. The need has increased in Johnson County just like it has everywhere else, but so far the pantries have been able to keep up, Bobst said. In July, the North Liberty pantry distributed 64,000 pounds of food, a new record. The next month, in August, it broke the record again, distributing 74,000 pounds of food.

Bobst said one of the main contributors to success in Johnson County is Table to Table, a food rescue organization that specializes in collecting food from grocery stores and other businesses that would otherwise be thrown away and delivering it to Johnson County pantries.

“Everybody really understands their place in the system. Table to Table doesn't do much direct distribution, and our pantries don't have to go to the store and pick donations up,” Nicki Ross, the director of Table to Table, said. “We have vehicles, we have volunteers, and that enables the pantries to allocate their team, their volunteers, their staff, to that direct distribution component.”

Recently, the pantries and other food organizations in the county have started meeting with Johnson County Public Health to set goals and make plans for the future of food security in the county. The plan is based on data and community input gathered by Johnson County Public Health over the last few years. Part of that process included going out to the pantries to talk to more than 300 community members there about their needs and what the county could do to support them.

“From there, we were able to invite partners in the community and have them really be a guide in how public health and us can work together to move forward for actionable items that would best benefit people that are being affected by this issue,” said Giselle Coreas, the health planner for Johnson County Public Health.

The funding and grant system for nonprofits in Johnson County also is collaborative — through a joint application process facilitated by the United Way of Johnson and Washington Counties — and well-supported by the county and city governments.

Government agencies — including Johnson County and the cities of Iowa City, Coralville and North Liberty — partner with United Way to receive grant applications during each United Way funding cycle. This means each nonprofit has to submit only one application per cycle to request funds from United Way and all of the government entities. Ross said the funding usually can be used for general overhead costs, rather than needing to be applied to specific projects.

“That consistent operational support, through those funders, has really stabilized our hunger relief network in Johnson County to the point where now the Coralville pantry and the North Liberty pantry and CommUnity Food Bank can look at opportunities for capacity building and extending their reach,” Ross said.

In 2023, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors authorized a one-time funding grant of $100,000 to be divided among the three large pantries in the county. The city of Coralville also contributed significantly to a capital campaign for the Coralville pantry, which went toward a new building that the pantry moved into a year and a half ago.

The North Liberty food pantry broke ground last week on a new $4 million building designed to meet growing demand. The pantry received $278,000 from the city of North Liberty. It has raised $850,000 so far, with fundraising efforts continuing.

“That’s a luxury we have here in Johnson County, where we feel very supported by our local governments,” said John Boller, executive director of the Coralville pantry. “So many things make us strong here in our food pantries in Johnson County and the majority of the state doesn’t have that … We’re experiencing burnout with our staff and our volunteers. People are exhausted. Resources are running low. I can only imagine how hard it is at organizations that don’t have the support system that we have.”

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com