A South Carolina food bank kicks in

Brenda Shaw grew up in southeastern Ohio, where her mother was the director of food service for the local school system. She spent the summers helping her mother to solve the free and reduced breakfast / lunch registrations for the students. As she grew up, Shaw volunteered in her church’s pantry. She eventually joined the Delaware County United Way board of directors and continued to volunteer at food distribution facilities in the region.

Five years ago, his struggle to eradicate hunger took Shaw to South Carolina, where he now runs food distribution programs for the Lowcountry Food Bank. The economic crisis of COVID-19 has exacerbated food insecurity and social service agencies are facing unprecedented demand during the holidays. Shaw, his coworkers and volunteers distributed more groceries on the last day of Thanksgiving than last year, and they expect a similar demand during Christmas, Kwanzaa and the New Year. They have already distributed more than £ 37 million in food this year and are on track to exceed the £ 32 million they distributed in 2019.

Before the pandemic, food insecurity rates across the country, they were the lowest since before the 2008 recession, according to Feeding America, the country’s largest hunger-fighting group. But the current economic crisis means that more people are going hungry. As the dollars of residents’ first stimulus checks run out and lines of cars stretch for miles in communities across the country, food banks are the difference between food on the table and an empty stomach.

One of the biggest barriers to obtaining SNAP benefits is the high levels of discrimination at work that black Americans face.

With some of the highest rates of COVID and unemployment, black Americans are also overrepresented in food insecure populations, according to a November 2020 report study by researchers from the Princeton Department of Sociology, Diana Enriquez and Adam Goldstein. Service workers, who are predominantly colored, have been hit hard by unemployment. With tourism practically nonexistent, restaurants and other leisure companies have reduced opening hours or closed, putting people’s livelihoods at risk.

Princeton researchers interviewed low-income people across the country who received the benefits of SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. They found that families skipped meals during closing, depended on food pantries to get enough to eat, and depended on friends and other family members for meals. Low-income black and Latino families also had higher rates of food insecurity than white families.

One of the biggest barriers to obtaining SNAP benefits is the high levels of discrimination at work that black Americans face. The SNAP imposes work requirements to obtain benefits, but these rules have been temporarily suspended under the Family First Coronavirus Response Act. But since the COVID emergency ends, job requirements could again disproportionately impact black Americans. “We know that the barriers to access SNAP and other nutrition programs tend to be higher in states with larger black populations,” says Enriquez.

Along the coast of South Carolina, the four southernmost counties – Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper – traditionally constitute the Lowcountry region. Rice was the main commercial crop during slavery, but after the Civil War, the appeal of beaches, swamps and forests in the coastal region slowly gave way to the tourism and service sectors that dominate the regional economy today.

In South Carolina, almost a third of the population is black. The Lowcountry Food Bank, a member of the Feeding America network, provides food assistance in ten coastal counties in the state. The black population ranges from almost 20% in Beaufort County, where 40% of black residents live in poverty, to Williamsburg County, where 65% of residents are black and about 30% of them are poor.

The food bank coordinates with its partner agencies to identify areas that lack networks of social service organizations and supermarkets. In many communities, food banks typically use large locations such as schools and churches as distribution locations. But underprivileged rural communities, where many black residents live, often lack adequate places to distribute food. “One of the big problems we have is that, in most rural areas, we can’t always find a place that has paving – we can’t move pallets of food on the gravel,” says Shaw.

Shaw recognizes that food insecurity is the first step towards homelessness, which puts additional stressors on human service agencies. “The rise in unemployment and unemployment benefits will soon adversely affect the service sectors, a large part of South Carolina’s coastal population,” said Shaw. “Many of the jobs in the service industry are not going to return until people feel safe to travel or until widespread vaccines are available.

With COVID-19 killing hundreds of Americans every day, a nutritious diet is crucial to maintaining a healthy immune system to help people fight the disease. The second coronavirus relief package approved by Congress includes $ 600 stimulus checks and $ 300 in weekly unemployment benefits. But millions of people will find that these insignificant sums of money will not provide the necessary impetus to pay off months of debt or put food on the table for more than a few weeks.