There’s a new community meal in town at the Sacred Heart Church, organized in part to address what local experts say is a rise in food insecurity.
The Monday dinners are open to the public, serving homemade bread and soup free of charge.
The initial impetus for the program, said organizer Jansy Hansen, was talk of inflation this winter and word of increased need at service organizations in town like the Salvation Army.
On a broad level, rising costs in recent months have been visible in increased fuel and shipping charges. Nationwide inflation rates released this week have spiked to their highest levels in three years. Locally, hundreds of residents signed a petition in April asking for a pause in the borough’s summer sales tax increase, citing those increased costs of living.
Since Hansen first began planning the community meal, local and regional organizations that serve free and reduced-cost meals say demand for their services has continued to increase.
In Juneau, the Southeast Alaska Food Bank gave out record-setting amounts of food in April, following a “large spike” this winter, said executive director Dan Parks on Wednesday. Detailed records for the organization’s food banks go back about two years, with less detailed records back to 1999, Parks said, so it’s hard to pinpoint precisely how the current need compares to historical peaks. But what is certain is it has been trending up.
“The short story is demand is high and resources are low,” Parks said.
It’s a similar story at the Haines Senior Center, which serves lunch three times a week, primarily to elders in the community. Program manager Christal Verhamme says attendance in person has been as high as she’s seen in her two-and-a-half years with the program. The senior center suggests a $5 donation from elders for the meals, but most, she says, haven’t been paying. One day last week, Verhamme said, a $5 donation for every meal served would’ve brought in $555. Instead, the donations totalled $43. That tells her the population she serves are adjusting to tighter budgets.
“A lot of people eating here are on fixed incomes, living month to month,” she said.
Experts say identifying trends can be complicated by seasonal factors affecting food demand. For instance, Parks said he normally sees less demand at food banks in the summer with more seasonal work available and lower utility bills.
Locally, Four Winds Resource Center food security program head Stacee Powlison said other factors push the opposite way: elders may have reduced food needs in the summer, able to supplement grocery purchases with subsistence harvest and gardening. At the same time, summer can be harder for families, with kids eating lunch at home instead of at school, which offers free meals.
For Four Winds, that means uncertainty about what exactly food bank demand might look like in the summer. It’s the same for Parks, though he’s not optimistic.
“I don’t know what to expect this summer, but given the cost of everything, I don’t expect demand to drop like we usually see,” he said.
Meanwhile, at Sacred Heart, Hansen said they’re ready to be a reliable and sustainable resource for community members. The program is funded at least through August, at which point the Haines Christian Women’s Fellowship expects to raise more money to sustain the program at their annual Southeast Alaska State Fair burger stand.
Hansen and other volunteers have attained necessary certifications — safe environment training, food handling certifications — to “do it right,” as she put it.
Roughly 20 people ate at the church this week, but Hansen said there’s enough soup to serve triple that number.
If all goes to plan, that will continue, and community members who show up at the church on Monday evenings will find the doors wide open to a room with long tables. There’s a choice of soups — chicken and black bean this past week — and bread served by volunteers at the tables. This week it was bread baked by community member Charlotte Olerud.
Anyone, Hansen emphasized, is welcome, whatever their need or reason for coming.
“We realize people’s budgets are getting tighter with everything being more expensive. We also realize there are lots of people that are lonely, that are isolated. We want to just open this up, and whoever wants to come can come,” Hansen said.
Particularly with the long tables, it’s a real community meal, in the sense that one doesn’t get much choice of who they sit with. “I think in this world that’s what we need,” she added. “We want multiple cross-sections of the community all coming together. That’s where meaningful dialogue happens. That’s how you build bonds.”