The Family Pantry delivers
COVID forced fundamental changes in how food gets to people who need it
Chris Menard at the “pandemic portal”
If you feel like you’ve had to pivot, swivel, cope and improvise to deal with this freakin’ pandemic, stop by the Family Food Pantry of Cape Cod in Harwich to be in good company -- and get a reality check.
Chris Menard, capably navigating the pantry for five years, has steered through a fundamental change in the way this crucial service is delivered. That needed to happen without skipping a beat, hopefully so others don’t skip meals; the pantry served 10,000 people last year, 4200 households, sending 100,000 bags of food worth roughly $3.9 million into the community.
Clients range from the elderly on fixed incomes to the working poor and the unemployed; hard data says 10 percent of Cape Cod residents are “food insecure,” tough as that might be for some of us to believe, and COVID only made it worse.
The biggest change?
“Since March 12, 2020, we’ve been locked down to the public,” says Menard.
For 31 years, people would show up, check in, line up, and shop. Those days are over. Now clients arrive and are handed a list (Spanish and Portuguese available) of about 130 items. They head back to the car or van, check off what they want, and hand the paper to a volunteer.
The rundown is in the same order as food stocked in the warehouse, so volunteers can shop quickly; what might have been a two-hour visit now takes 15 minutes. Clients pick up their bags at a new 10-foot window cut out of the wall, “the pandemic portal,” smiles Menard.
Efficiency is one attraction to the new system. Another, says Chris, quoting from a client survey, is that “the whole process is more anonymous.” For those who feel embarrassed or stigmatized by accepting pantry food, COVID forced the creation of a less public interaction. Plus people don’t have to haul kids out of the car and shepherd them around the facility.
“We’ll never go back to the old way,” Menard predicts.
Meanwhile, more food has gone mobile. Pantry vans fan out to smaller hubs in six towns, using Council on Aging partners to manage deliveries, working off the same ordering lists. Another 20 or so organizations receive bulk shipments on pallets, stable commodities like pasta, peanut butter, rice, beans, oatmeal.
But for it all to work, there is one more essential staple: volunteers.
Take a guess at how many people show up and chip in at this pantry. Would you say 100? Get crazy and say 200?
The real number, says Chris, is 650.
She ticks off the jobs; a cadre of truck drivers, 15-20 people filling orders, another 6-8 distributing protein and produce, 5-6 per shift just cutting cardboard to open boxes, gardeners for the plot used to grow fresh vegetables, “eight people who do nothing but send out thank you letters.” All this supplements a paid staff of three full time and four part time.
Little doubt, in its no-nonsense way, that the Pantry engages the most year-round volunteers of any organization on the Cape. And while some people stepped back because of COVID, mainly because their own health issues required caution, “our volunteers never missed a beat,” says Menard. “They absolutely showed up, and keep showing up.”
If all this COVID context and impact isn’t enough, add this:
Chris, careful as she is, got it. And she got it early, diagnosed in May, 2020.
She was laid up for weeks, diminished for months.
“Even when I was back at work, sometimes I would just lean my back against a wall, slide down to the floor, sit there and talk to people,” she remembers.
But being who she is, she also did something that took a different kind of strength: She went public, sharing her experience at a time when few people knew any healthy, engaged people who had gotten sick.
She still gets appreciation for her open honesty, and with the pantry healthy as well, evolving with challenges, she can look back and probably echo the feelings of many who come week by week:
“That was the toughest year of my life.”
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