Bags and boxes of food await at the Salvation Army Harrisburg drive-through pickup.
The face of a little boy is captured in Kathy Anderson-Martin’s memory. His eyes followed her, as she put milk on the table—the table holding grocery items his family was about to receive—and he started licking his lips.
“I heard the mom telling him they would have it when they got home,” said Anderson-Martin of the Salvation Army Harrisburg Capital City Region.
This is the faith-based charity’s fifth week of crisis operations, which began on March 16, and the needs continue to escalate.
“We are seeing a record number of new folks who have never used our services before—more and more folks who have lost employment, as well as small business owners, from all walks of life,” said Anderson-Martin.
The numbers demonstrate the need.
In the first four weeks of crisis operations, the Salvation Army distributed food equivalent to 130,835 meals. To put it in perspective, that’s the amount of food they distributed under typical circumstances over six months last year.
More than 1,000 households—1,087 to be exact—received boxes of food during the past four weeks, and 66 percent of those households had never received food from the Salvation Army before. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization provided food equivalent to 5,400 meals per week. That’s increased six or sevenfold to 32,000 meals per week, or 80 households per day.
Normally, the Salvation Army provides a daily hot breakfast, access to their food pantry via a “choice shopping model,” youth programs with meals, and more. With COVID-19 safety regulations in place, plus a spike in needs, the organization is providing hot breakfasts only on Wednesday mornings from 9 to 10 a.m. from their 29th Street location, along with distribution of food via a drive-through six days of the week, by appointment. Boxes are designed to help families put food on the table for about a week.
“We need to strike a balance between serving people and protecting our staff, so everything is highly organized and designed to eliminate crowds,” said Anderson-Martin. “Families line up in their cars, and we bring their orders out to a table. Families retrieve the food once we go back in.”
She described it as a “triage process,” by which families make an initial call, go through a brief questionnaire with staff members working remotely from their homes, then receive an appointment time for food distribution.
Not all families have cars. Anderson-Martin noted some families arrive on foot or via bus, carrying the 25-pound boxes and additional grocery bags home.
“We’re making the food orders a little more generous than usual so that people don’t have to come back as frequently,” she said.
What does a typical family receive? A core box of kitchen staples is supplied by a partner, the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank. The Salvation Army adds fresh produce, bread, milk, eggs and meat. The charity is serving a larger footprint than normal, absorbing residents of additional zip codes beyond their standard coverage area, due to smaller food banks’ closure or reduced capacity.
“The volume going out is crazy, but the community has been incredibly supportive,” said Anderson-Martin. “We have a fairly robust food rescue program that’s continued and increased [during COVID-19]—retail outlets such as grocery stores and restaurants that are providing more.”
Fresh food donations arrive from 10 different retailers, five days a week, totaling more than 100,000 pounds of rescued food in a typical year.
The Salvation Army’s standard annual budget is $3.4 million, which fuels 11 programs that serve 23,000 individuals.
But it’s obvious 2020 will be anything but a typical year.
“Financial contributions are the best way people can help, from the individual who sends $25 to those who’ve sent much more. We’ve had a terrific response, but honestly, we need that,” Anderson-Martin said. “We can’t accept food donations or volunteers, unlike normal circumstances.”
All the Tools
On a larger scale, the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank’s mission is to reduce hunger across 27 counties by supplying more than 1,000 agencies and programs with food, including Harrisburg’s chapter of the Salvation Army.
“My age is 56, so I’ve been around a while,” said Joe Arthur, executive director of the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank. “The closest thing [to this pandemic] is when I landed here 12 years ago, working through the financial crisis and great recession…. That took a fair number of months to develop… but this time it’s so immediate and so pervasive—it’s touching so many households.”
That immediacy is clear in the comparisons—Arthur calls it “staggering.”
Overall, the food bank’s distributions have spiked by 25 percent. They supply a network of soup kitchens and food pantries that normally serve 135,000 central Pennsylvanians—but the need has ballooned to 175,000 residents. In the past four weeks, they distributed almost 6.5 million pounds of food—that’s 2 million pounds above normal. They are packing and shipping 5,000 boxes of food every day—enough to fill four tractor-trailers.
What’s inside each standard brown cardboard box that eventually finds its way into a family’s hands?
Arthur said the ingredients—pantry staples—are intended to sustain a small family of four or five members, “to help them get by.” Boxes contain pasta and sauce, cereal, a quart of shelf stable milk, granola or cereal bars, peanut butter and snack foods, along with canned vegetables, soup, chili and tomatoes. They also distribute fresh food—produce and dairy products—to partners that have the ability to distribute it, such as the Salvation Army or Mechanicsburg’s New Hope Ministries.
One of the biggest issues facing the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank is a breakdown in the supply chain, especially for shelf-stable, boxed food and canned goods.
“You can’t buy what’s not available,” Arthur said. “The continued over-buying in grocery stores is stretching the supply lines.”
He said the nonprofit has already placed food orders stretching through June 30 to meet needs.
“The good news is, in the world of fresh produce, dairy, milk and eggs, we’re able to source in abundance every day,” he said. “Unfortunately, dairy farmers are in worse crisis now than they’ve seen over past five years, so there’s a lot of milk available—and we’re moving that at record levels.”
The organization has been “blessed” by a flood of donations, Arthur said, including substantial corporate gifts:
- In March, the Giant Co. donated $250,000 to four hunger relief organizations including the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank.
- On April 15, Giant announced it was donating an additional $250,000 to 18 local hunger relief organizations including the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, Harrisburg’s Downtown Daily Bread, Mechanicsburg’s New Hope Ministries, Carlisle’s Project Share, Perry County Food Bank, Lebanon County Christian Ministries, York County Food Bank and Lancaster’s Water Street Rescue Mission.
- The food bank received a $100,000 grant from the PNC Foundation on April 14.
- Sizable gifts to the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank by several health insurance companies have included those by Highmark Health and Capital BlueCross, Arthur said.
“General donors by the hundreds are coming to our website to make donations too—and we’ve been incredibly inspired by that,” Arthur noted.
The nonprofit is also accepting volunteers via their website.
An additional financial shot in the arm, available to the region’s food banks and shelters, was announced on April 15. Two of the region’s largest nonprofit funders—The Foundation for Enhancing Communities and United Way of the Capital Region—partnered to establish a COVID-19 Community Response Fund. They launched the initiative with an initial $118,000 in donations culled from the Hershey Co., Highmark Health, TFEC and private donors.
At the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, the typical annual operating budget is $16 million, which allows for the distribution of 50 to 60 million pounds of food.
“We’re adding probably 10 million pounds of food on top of that, most of which has to be purchased—and that’s just to get through June,” said Arthur.
He noted that the financial effects will easily be felt through 2020—and possibly beyond.
“On the expense side of this crisis response, we think this will go on for months,” Arthur said. “We are about $2 million above normal expenditures due to the crisis response through the end of the fiscal year at the end of June. And we are using some of our own reserves saved over the years—this crisis is that big. We’re using all the tools in our toolbox.”
To contact the Salvation Army Harrisburg Capital City Region and see if you’re eligible for food distribution, call 717-233-6755. For more information, or to make a donation, see pa.salvationarmy.org/harrisburg-pa.
Anyone within the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank’s 27-county coverage area can locate feeding programs by calling the nonprofit’s helpline at 877-999-5964. To donate or volunteer, see centralpafoodbank.org.
To learn more about the COVID-19 Community Response Fund or to make a donation, see tfec.org/covid19. Nonprofit organizations based in Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lebanon, Perry and Northern York Counties are invited to apply for assistance through the fund at tfec.org/covid19resources.
