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Feeling the pinch
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by REID SILVERMAN
Left, Anne Margolis of California organizes food donated to the food pantry last week at Church of the Ascension, which is run by HOPE. Right, Hilma Andrews of California, who has volunteered at the pantry for 10 years, checks some records at the pantry. HOPE and other assistance organizations are noticing an increase in requests as more and more people are being affected by tough economic times.
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Rose Weiland and Carol Rocheteau, co-directors of volunteers for HOPE of Southern Maryland, sat in HOPE’s office on the lower level of Church of the Ascension on Great Mills Road on Wednesday as volunteers at the church’s food pantry finished helping the last clients of the day. Stopping periodically to answer questions from the volunteers or to retrieve a figure from their paperwork, the two women described a disturbing change over the past several months. There has been an increase both in the amount of help that HOPE clients have been requesting as well as an increase in the numbers of new clients.
‘‘More people are coming to the food pantry,” Rocheteau said. ‘‘And we are getting many more requests for assistance.”
| Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by REID SILVERMAN
Left, Anne Margolis of California organizes food donated to the food pantry last week at Church of the Ascension, which is run by HOPE. Right, Hilma Andrews of California, who has volunteered at the pantry for 10 years, checks some records at the pantry. HOPE and other assistance organizations are noticing an increase in requests as more and more people are being affected by tough economic times.
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‘‘We had a terrible run on the pantry,” Rocheteau said of the first month of the year.
HOPE, an acronym for Helpers Overcoming Problems Effectively, is a nonprofit group supported by area churches, the United Way and private donations. For the past 20 years has been assisting needy people in the county by staffing the food pantry at the Church of the Ascension and providing financial assistance for a variety of needs.
‘‘We do all sorts of things,” Rocheteau said.
HOPE tries to help with fuel, electricity, rent and medication bills and sometimes medical and dental costs and eye glasses.
But ‘‘we have a limited amount we can do,” Rocheteau said.
The increased numbers of requests for help have only stretched those already limited resources more.
‘‘You feel bad for the people,” Weiland said.
‘‘I think it’s just the times we’re in, really,” Rocheteau said. ‘‘Minimum wage doesn’t go up ... but gas goes up, rent goes up ... Some of [HOPE clients] work two or three jobs and still can’t make ends meet.
‘‘People around here are feeling the pinch.”
With the ballooning price of gas an ongoing concern and the more recent home mortgage crisis, the economy has pushed its way to newspaper fronts, the beginning of nightly newscasts and the center of the presidential race.
Charities like HOPE are also feeling the effects of these problems on people who were already finding it difficult to make ends meet.
In January, 140 people contacted HOPE for financial assistance of some kind. About a third of those requests, 46 of them, were from new clients – people who hadn’t sought that kind of assistance before. At the food pantry, 197 households were helped, with 36 of those households new to HOPE.
The numbers were similar in February, with 61 people requesting financial assistance, 22 of whom were new clients, and with 119 households helped by the food pantry, 17 of which were new.
‘‘And that kind of adds up over the year,” Rocheteau said.
Other food pantries and nonprofits that provide assistance to needy people are reporting differing levels of fallout from the current economic squeeze. But there’s an increase in need everywhere.
Suzanne Ferguson, secretary for Helping Hands, a food pantry in Hollywood, said they have not noticed a sudden jump in need.
‘‘I do think the need is there ... It’s not in the big numbers you’d expect right now,” Ferguson said Saturday.
Volunteers who run the pantry, however, suspect that people who need the assistance may be having trouble getting to the Helping Hands location.
Instead, Ferguson said Helping Hands has over time noticed a steady increase in need that doesn’t seem to be leveling off.
The Loaves and Fishes Ministry, a soup kitchen and food pantry at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Leonardtown, reports a similar steady increase.
‘‘We used to say we help 40 to 50 people a week. Now it’s getting up to 60 and 70,” said Ann Richards, a volunteer with the ministry.
When the food pantry opens each Tuesday and Thursday, there is a line of 30 to 40 people waiting in line, Richards said.
Brenda DeCarlo, program manager of the Southern Maryland Food Bank in Hughesville, said the increasing pressures on area food pantries reflects what should be considered an alarming trend. ‘‘What we’re seeing ... is a change in the face of hunger. We’re seeing what was once middle class and higher income families walking through the door,” DeCarlo said Monday morning. ‘‘We’ve got two-parent, working families coming in.”
It used to be that food pantries and assistance programs expected senior citizens and others on a fixed income as well as single parents to be their major clientele. Now, ‘‘families that were OK two years ago, now they’re finding it a struggle,” she said.
The Southern Maryland Food Bank offers food at 18 cents a pound for close to 40 food pantries and group homes throughout the region. And DeCarlo said she is hearing about the increased need from those organizations. ‘‘The pressure is on to supply pantries with more,” she said. ‘‘We are finding it a real struggle to meet those needs.”
Food pantries need help, she said.
‘‘There is a huge problem and it needs to be addressed,” DeCarlo said.
Back at the HOPE office, Rocheteau and Weiland shake their heads at their clients’ struggles.
‘‘We’d love to help people more, but we don’t have the finances,” Rocheteau said.
‘‘We try to meet the needs of these people as best we can,” Weiland said.
scraton@somdnews.com
