Eight cars in 90 seconds: distribution during the pandemic
Food banks are among the essential services that continue working during the COVID-19 pandemic. With unemployment insurance claims skyrocketing to historic levels, the demand for food assistance has also increased. That has coincided with a drop-off in the numbers of volunteers to pack emergency boxes and distribute food.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, from 250 to 300 people were volunteering to pack food boxes daily at St.Mary's Food Bank.
Jerry Brown, the Director of Media Relations at St. Mary's Food Bank Alliance, discusses how prioritizing the safety of its customers and volunteers, helped St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix to adapt and become more efficient.
JERRY BROWN: At our main distribution centers in Phoenix, at Surprise, we have changed to a drive-through model. So we're serving eight cars every 90 seconds and no one can leave their cars. They give us their information through the window. We pop the trunk and put the food in the trunk so there's no contact whatsoever. And that is a much quicker model and a much safer model.
So because we're able to serve about the same families, amount of families in five hours that we used to do in seven we cut our hours back from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM to 8:30 to 1:30. We're serving about the same amount of families, but it gives us two hours in the afternoon to help us build emergency food boxes and stock up for the next day.
What was happening was we were working all day distributing food and we didn't have enough time to turn around and get ready for the next day because we're still seeing more than a thousand families a day. It ranges from 1000 to 1500 depending on the day.
Before the pandemic, 250 to 300 people were volunteering to pack food boxes daily. Brown says that the number plummeted to about 20 in March.
JERRY BROWN: We had to come up with an entirely different way of packing the food, social distanced, six feet apart.
In the meantime, we have had the Arizona national guard. The governor has sent us between 50 and 70 national guard troops to help us build food boxes, to help us distribute those food boxes to the families that have come through the drive-through.
And slowly but surely the amount of volunteers has increased as people have been informed that we are practicing social distancing. We're getting more volunteers. We're trying to cap it at about 50 per session so that we can keep social distancing and use and build two lines of food boxes.
In addition to social distancing, volunteers and national guards also wear masks and gloves.
JERRY BROWN: Eight lines are being served at one time and they're all distant apart. It's one person at the front of the car taking the information down from the client where they live and one volunteer in the back of the car loading the car. And we're asking folks to ‘Please, clean out the trunks’ before they come cause we don't want to be in a situation where we're putting food in the back seat.
For people without a car, there is a separate walk-in entrance. Food assistance is free, but clients need to show proof of Arizona address, for example, driving license.
JERRY BROWN: The reason why we want to monitor that is because of the emergency food box, that one box that has the cans in it. That's part of the emergency food box government program, you can only receive one of those a month. We're already distributing 60,000 of those a month and that means one family once a month. If families were receiving more than one of those food boxes a month, we wouldn't have enough. But in addition to that food box, they're still receiving all of the food that we're getting from other sources: milk, eggs, ice cream, fresh fruits and vegetables, meats. And if a family needs to come back a second time within the month, they're able to do that.
On average, Brown says a food bank client receives from thirty to forty pounds of groceries. Before the pandemic, a significant portion of distributed food was donated by stores.
JERRY BROWN: We receive about 20% of our food from grocery stores. And that food has almost disappeared. And we also lost a lot of individual food drives where offices, businesses, boy scout troops, whoever does a food drive for us to collect food.
But there are a lot of restaurant distributors, a lot of people who make large deliveries to restaurants that cannot handle that. Right now we're seeing a lot of donations from those folks that are helping to make up for some of the food we're losing from other sources.
But he says financial donations haven’t decreased, during the pandemic.
JERRY BROWN: Anecdotally, just in the last week, we've seen a lot of donations for exactly $1,200 and $2,400, which we can only guess are people who are receiving their stimulus checks, and deciding that there are people who need it more than they do, which is an amazing, emotional thing. We've had dozens and dozens and dozens of $1,200 checks.
In addition to distribution centers, St.Mary’s Food Bank delivers food to the communities by trucks. On April 14, the mobile pantry provided a record amount of groceries for Navajo Nation families in Tuba City.
JERRY BROWN: We had 90,000 pounds of food up there and it was given away to 2000 families in less than two hours.
Brown says St. Mary’s Food Bank is going to support most affected communities statewide, including hourly workers and students of the community colleges.