October 10, 2005
By Sherri Begin
Crain's Detroit Business - Detroit
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How they’re hurting |
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Gleaners Food Bank of Southeastern Michigan: Down to four weeks of food, new deliveries headed to Gulf Coast.
Food Gatherers: 20 percent decline in its collections over the same period of last year.
Cass Community Social Services: Donations down, inventory down to four or five days’ worth of items. It usually has a month’s worth. |
The ripple effects of this year’s Gulf Coast hurricanes already are hitting Southeast Michigan.
Nonprofits that provide emergency food, beds, clothing and other items are seeing shortages brought on by donations diverted to hurricane-ravaged areas.
Those shortages are coming on top of historically high numbers of people in need and cuts in funding.
Gleaners Food Bank of Southeastern Michigan, which provides food to shelters, soup kitchens and pantries in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, has only about four weeks of food to provide to the 440 agencies it supplies.
Those agencies feed about 80,000 people a day.
Being on a four-week supply in-house wouldn’t signal an alarm if the replenishment pipeline was filled with pending deliveries of new donations from the national donation system administered by Chicago-based America’s Second Harvest, President Agostinho Fernandes Jr said.
But since the hurricanes, the national food bank system that supplies Gleaners and more than 200 other food banks and food rescues around the country with donated food has diverted a large part of the shipments to areas that were either devastated by the storms or that are housing large numbers of evacuees.
In 2004, America’s Second Harvest distributed an average of 27.3 million pounds of food a month to its 210 food bank and food-rescue affiliates across the U.S.
In September, after Hurricane Katrina, that shot up to 52 million pounds, media-relations manager Ross Fraser said.
Of the total, 32 million pounds went to food banks that were directly affected by Katrina or areas like Houston that were housing a large number of evacuees, he said.
“Now we want to get all of our affiliates back on an equal footing so they’re all getting what they were getting before.”
Local donations also are down significantly, Fernandes said.
“Until we actually see in the pipeline that we have loads of food that we need coming, we will have to increase food purchases,” Fernandes said.
The food bank, which had total revenue of $27.2 million in fiscal 2004 and a loss of just under $500,000, is tapping its reserves to purchase more food, he said. It has about $1.4 million left in reserve. With average monthly expenses of about $434,000 to provide food to 440 agencies in Southeast Michigan, Gleaners will have depleted even those resources within three months, he said.
But that is assuming an average month, not the worst need during the winter months, and it does not completely account for the rising costs of transporting food and purchasing it, Fernandes said.
The agencies Gleaners supplies with food are reporting 18 percent to 30 percent increases in the numbers of qualified people coming in for assistance, he said.
And costs are rising along with need. Many of the distribution and food-warehousing centers Gleaners typically receives food from are in the areas destroyed by the hurricanes.
“Until things stabilize we may also have to reach out further in distance to get the types of food we need to bring in for inventory,” Fernandes said.
Right now, the food bank’s costs to ship food to Michigan are up 38 percent from this time last year, Fernandes said.
Before Katrina struck, the average cost per pound to bring in food to Southeast Michigan was 3 cents. Today the cost is about 5.5 cents, Fernandes said.
Bringing in a semitruck full of food, which is about 42,000 pounds, now will cost nearly twice as much, at about $2,300 compared with $1,260 before the hurricanes, he said.
Food Gatherers in Ann Arbor, which had an annual budget of $6.4 million in 2004, collects two-thirds of its shelf-stable food donations between September and Thanksgiving each year through canned food drives held in Washtenaw County and from distributions from America’s Second Harvest.
Last month, national donations were nonexistent for Southeast Michigan or not highly nutritious options, Executive Director Eileen Spring said.
As a result of those declines and drops in local donations of canned food and other shelf-stable food items, the food rescue/food bank saw a 20 percent decline in its collections over the same period of last year.
“That does not bode well,” Spring said.
Cass Community Social Services in Detroit, which reported annual revenue of $3.2 million in 2003 and today has a budget of about $3.5 million, provides not only food but also shelter and personal hygiene products to homeless people in the region.
Donations of food, sheets, personal hygiene products and laundry detergent are down, said the Rev. Faith Fowler, executive director of the agency.
Prior to the hurricanes, Cass Community was able to keep about a month’s worth of food in its pantry to distribute about 300 boxes to needy families each month, she said.
“Now we’re down to four or five days,” Fowler said.
Cass Community also runs the rotating shelter for Detroit and Wayne County and offers transitional housing for the homeless at three Detroit sites.
Normally, at this point in the year, the agency has enough sheets to provide beds for 100 people, she said. But now it has none.
One area hotel that was replacing all of its bedding had promised the used items to Cass Community. But when one of the agency’s volunteers went to pick up the items last week, the owner told him he was sorry; the bedding had been sent to New Orleans, Fowler said.
The same week Detroit announced it would take 3,000 evacuees, Cass Community was notified by the city that its money for homeless women and children would be cut in half.
The agency’s fee for administering the program had been cut to $60,000 last year from $80,000 the year before. And the city was proposing cutting it to $40,000 for this year, Fowler said.
“I told them we can’t do it for that; that wouldn’t even get us to Christmas.”
The city is talking with other nonprofits to see if it can find one that can work with that figure, she said.
“We’re the city with the highest percentage of poor people in America; that hasn’t improved.”
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