The New Needy, Outpacing Charity

By Robin Finn
The New York Times
December 9, 2007

Huntington Station - Her name is not Mother Hubbard, and her room-size cupboard is not bare; in fact, it is half full (or half empty, depending on outlook). It displays an unexciting array of non-perishables like canned tuna, canned corn and canned soup; food for fuel, not fun. “Would you eat this stuff if you didn’t have to?” Fran Leek asks, rhetorically only, while eyeballing an aisle of boxed macaroni and cheese.

Unsentimental by necessity, Ms. Leek has been, for a dozen years, the director of parish outreach for St. Hugh of Lincoln, a sprawling Roman Catholic church in a downtrodden neighborhood. “Demand is up by 150 percent from what it was when I started,” she estimated. “It’s hard to think what would happen if we shut down because we ran out of food and money.” She can see it happen.

St. Hugh initially allowed each local family registered with its program to load up on groceries once a month; two years ago Ms. Leek, trying to stabilize inventory, cut the visits back to every other month. Because of a client influx, it didn’t help. So each month she still assists a total of 350 families. “I have horrific stats,” she says. “If I went back to feeding everybody once a month, we’d be down to the bare walls.”

The vast majority of her clients represent the working poor; suddenly they are consuming charity by the can-load. Four free bags of groceries mean they can make the rent or the mortgage and put food on the table.

“I’m seeing a lot of the working poor just barely getting by,” says Ms. Leek, who operates the largest pantry in the Town of Huntington, almost as large, she says, as those in Wyandanch, in the Town of Babylon, and Roosevelt, in the Town of Hempstead. “I call us the pocket of poor surrounded by wealthy North Shore neighbors.”

The pocket is expanding, and the appetites of the new needy on Long Island are beginning to outpace the food collected and distributed by Ms. Leek and others. An unsettling national trend has hit home. The demand on food banks (Long Island Cares in Hauppauge, dreamed up by the musician Harry Chapin a year before his death en route to a benefit concert in 1981, is the Island’s only food bank) and food rescue agencies (Island Harvest in Mineola serves the entire Island) is up by 40 percent, the groups say.

The supplies? Not up by 40 percent. According to Long Island Cares, which this year distributed more than five million pounds of food to 600 social service groups, and Island Harvest, which shipped seven million pounds of food to eight Islandwide distribution sites, including the Macy’s parking lot in affluent Manhasset, 350,000 Long Islanders are compromised by hunger; 93,000 are children, 39,000 the elderly.

“The truth is that the demand for help is up dramatically from last year,” says Randi Shubin Dresner, the president of Island Harvest. “In 2006 we were asked to provide 9,000 holiday turkeys; this year the goal is 22,000 and we haven’t hit it. The crisis is that hunger is where it shouldn’t be, on affluent Long Island. The new face of hunger is the working poor. When people are living right on the edge, trying to pay rent and put gas in the car, the first thing given up is food.”

Lynn Needelman, the executive director of Long Island Cares, agrees: “The situation with the working poor is the one that causes the most alarm: these are people who didn’t used to come to pantries. They didn’t have to; now they do. The hope is that by feeding them, we’re helping them hang onto their homes. Harry Chapin used to tell me, ‘You don’t have to end world hunger; just end one person’s hunger and you’ve made a difference.’”

As Ms. Leek checks the foodstuffs in her pantry in the first week of December, she is not upbeat.

“I’m out of cereal,” she says crabbily, scanning the makeshift shelves, “and if I’m out now, I’ll be out until next year, which means one of my staples is gone.” This was Monday afternoon. By Tuesday morning, Ms. Leek noticed she was out of another child-friendly staple, jelly. Aggravating.

“Come back here in January and you won’t be able to rub three cans together,” she predicts. Ms. Leek combats frustration with humor: “You have to be good at guilt-tripping your friends when things get tough at the pantry.” Hint to Ms. Leek’s friends: Send cereal and jelly. In bulk, but not too bulky (humongous Costco-size items aren’t space effective).

Her outreach program, along with others administered by the Long Island Council of Churches and Catholic Charities, helps clients with heat and rent as well as food emergencies, but not this month. “For the first time that I can ever remember, we all ran out of money at the same time in November,” Ms. Leek says. “That’s how bad the demand has been.”

LaKesha Quick of Huntington Station, a 32-year-old mother of three who works part time at a nursing home, stopped by the St. Hugh pantry on Tuesday for food and holiday gift certificates. She says that she survives paycheck to paycheck and that the groceries provided by the pantry “absolutely make a difference between being able to put food on the table for me and my kids or not.”

The church gave her a turkey basket for Thanksgiving. Now, the Christmas gift certificates will buy robes, pajamas and underwear. “I’ve never been sent away empty-handed when I’ve come here for help,” she says. And without the help?

Not a fair question.