Food insecurity.

All right, so, now I’m really frustrated. I work at a small social service agency, and one of our biggest programs is our monthly distribution of free groceries to people who would otherwise just go hungry. (This is in the U.S.) Where do we get this food, you might be asking yourself. Why, from The Second Harvest Food Bank, of course!

Let me give some background information. For anyone who has randomly stumbled upon this blog, and doesn’t know me, I live in a very small town. The permanent population here (permanent because it’s adjusted to not include the college students who go to school here) is just about 5,000. Tiny. The little organization that I work for gives out almost 400 bags of groceries every month! Many of the recipients of these goods are senior citizens, and the demographic that’s not over 65 is mostly made up of large families (like 6 or more kids) with or without a dad in the household (usually without). All of these people rely on our food pantry to fill their stomachs for at least one week out of the month.

So. The Food Bank that we order from has recently gone through some staff changes: a new Executive Director, a new Agency Relations Coordinator, and a new Food Order Specialist. So now none of the administrators have worked there for longer than six months. Great.

Generally I place an order with the Food Bank once a month, and it’s delivered on the first Friday of the month (today). So, the truck arrives this morning, the delivery guy greets me (he is super nice), and he starts to unload our order. Except there are only two pallets of food, compared to our usual five!

What happened and where is our food?

I call up the Food Bank and ask to speak with the “Food Order Specialist”. Except she’s only part-time so she won’t be back in until Monday. Okay. So, I ask to speak with the “Agency Relations Coordinator” but she refuses to talk to me about it until I make contact with the “Food Order Specialist”. Jesus Christ. So I hang up the phone and go to lunch.

Usually I am even tempered, and the total inadequacy and lack of professionalism in others is something that I can tolerate. But this is the third month in a row that the food order I placed has ended up being majorly fucked up.

Not to mention the fact that a woman who works for another non-profit called me up a few weeks ago to vent about her troubles with the Food Bank. Her food order had also been royally messed up, and she called up the “Food Order Specialist” to complain. Granted, she was probably pissed off when she called, and maybe didn’t come off that well on the phone, but the woman that she ended up talking to over there made her cry, and even hung up on her!

What is wrong here? These little agencies that are trying to feed the hungry are staffed mostly by volunteers, some of them largely inexperienced at what they do. But they’re working towards a wonderful goal; feeding people who otherwise wouldn’t eat. The Food Bank gets massive funding from United Way, and their ONLY JOB is to get food to us. But not only are they totally ineffectual at doing that, they treat us like we’re a total nuisance.

But even more than that… you can yell at me, hang up on me, hate me with all of your being. In the long run, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that people who are hungry (seniors, kids, babies, families, etc.) are not being fed because of internal office politics and just plain inept staff of a non-profit agency that forgot why it exists.