Hunger persists in Delaware

Unemployment is down, the price of gas is down and fewer people are signing up for food stamps. All signs of a rebounding economy.

But those signs are not clearly visible from the doorway of Delaware's soup kitchens and food pantries.

Hunger is still a growing issue in Delaware. Volunteers and those working every day, face-to-face with the hungry say they still see great suffering and great need, especially among children and older residents.

"Within the last year, the demand for emergency food here has gone up 39 percent," said Joe Hickey, director of St. Patrick's Center in Wilmington, a food donation center and homeless shelter. "And the number of children that are served increased 69 percent. There's no lessening. Day-to-day here, that's the picture."

In Delaware, statistics on federal food stamp recipients showed incremental progress. In 2013, 153,000 Delawareans, on average, were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, at any one time, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2014, that figure slid to 150,000. Forty-two other states also saw their food stamp rolls drop.

But groups on the front lines say that slight improvement has not meant any less demand for their charity work, for school and workplace food drives or for soup kitchens and senior meal deliveries.

"We're seeing a consistent demand from adults and a consistent demand from children," said Patricia Beebe, president and CEO of the Food Bank of Delaware. "Many people are working but they're not really making a living wage. They still need assistance to live the sort of middle America dream ... Do I think that people are less needy than they were before? No. But I am encouraged by the fact that we seem to be working better, and together."

No mid-Atlantic state has a higher share of its population on SNAP than Delaware, where 16.7 percent of residents receive the aid. The nationwide average is 15 percent, according to September data compiled by the Food Research and Action Center. The same organization ranked Delaware 13th in a "food hardship" comparison of the 50 states in 2012.

Kenny Armstrong, a 68-year-old Army veteran, needs help putting food on his table. This week, he waited with other veterans outside a VA office in Georgetown to pick up a 30-pound box of donated food.

At an age when many hope to have retired, Armstrong has just re-entered the work force. A few weeks ago he started driving all the way from eastern Sussex County to Federalsburg, Md. for a security guard job.

He had stopped working a similar position earlier this year but found retirement wasn't in the cards. His expenses wouldn't let him and his wife get by on disability income alone in their manufactured home.

"I was starting to feel like I had to work. Every year rent goes up, and you've gotta sign, like, a five-year lease," Armstrong said. "I've never been on food stamps, but this helps a lot, compared to if you had to go and buy it."

He pulled up to a box truck and accepted the food he'd prepare at Christmastime this year: frozen turkey, stuffing, canned vegetables, potatoes.

In a broad sense, groups working to get food on the tables of poor households saw their challenges ease a bit in 2014. A Gallup poll that asked people whether there have been times in the past year when they didn't have enough money to buy the food they needed saw the percentage of people answering yes drop from 18.9 percent at the end of 2013 to 17.2 percent in October.

"This year's decrease in the percentage of Americans reporting a struggle to afford food is a positive sign that the economic recovery now could be reaching those who previously struggled to afford the basics," Gallup said in a November analysis of its poll.

The most vulnerable

There's a special focus on ensuring the young and the old don't go hungry.

For Meals on Wheels agencies, which see to it that thousands of senior citizens get hot meals delivered to their homes several times a week, there's no shortage of routes.

"Our clients are the ones either unable to cook for themselves or unable to shop for themselves," said Andrea Woie, a development manager of Meals on Wheels of Delaware. "The frail seniors, usually lonely. About 4,000 seniors are delivered to every day."

Two of those 4,000 are Dawson Gillaspy, 84, and his wife Mary, 82, who live in a Newark apartment. They moved there from Sussex County where Dawson Gillaspy, to keep busy in retirement, had himself delivered for Meals on Wheels.

But when Mary's health faltered, he said, they moved to a smaller home upstate.

"My wife is not well, and I don't cook," Gillaspy said in an interview. "I joke with them – if it weren't for Meals on Wheels we'd be eating frozen food. Poorly prepared food, poorly prepared by me. We'd have to do our own shopping, and more importantly our own cooking. That's my deficiency."

So he signed them up for meals, and most weekdays both Gillaspys get a tray of hot food delivered at about 11:30. Lunch is their highest-calorie meal.

"It's usually two vegetables and a meat of some sort, fish maybe once or twice a week," Gillaspy said. "We get milk, and butter and bread. It's a complete meal. They're not gourmet meals but the portion is appropriate. It's as healthy a meal as I could come up with."

Carla Grygiel is executive director of the Newark Senior Center; it's there, in the kitchen, where the meals are cooked and packaged for Newark's Meals on Wheels clients, more than 100 of them a day. They are asked to donate to the program and, on average, give $3.50 a meal.

"Some people receive help maybe after a surgery or a fall, when they're recovering," Grygiel said. "But we have some people up to 15 years or so... some are not only getting hot meals for lunchtime, but they're getting a bag supper and meals for the weekend. What that tells us is nobody is helping them with their basic needs. It's pretty disheartening."

There's constant concern in social welfare circles about seniors getting enough to eat.

"As people get older, they get a little more isolated," said Kimberly Iapalucci of AARP Delaware, which does year-round outreach to connect seniors to food aid if they need it. "But younger people" – in the AARP context, from 50 to 59 – "are becoming food-insecure, and they're also becoming primary caretakers for grandchildren. They're providing living and medical expenses for grandkids. There's a gap in that 50-59 age range. They don't know SNAP exists. And I think there's a little bit of a stigma."

Children are another focus of special food aid programs, since they are dependent on others for meals and since their educational prospects suffer if they go through the school day hungry.

The Delaware Department of Education has offered incentives to school districts that increase how many of their students eat breakfast at school. That's led several districts to simply make breakfast a schoolwide event, like lunch is, often serving it in homeroom.

And some districts have found a need for food pantries within schools, where donated food and toiletries are given toe kids who need them. Michelle Murphy, who's in charge of the pantry at G.W. Carver Educational Center in Frankford, said the district encourages parents to come in to get the donated food rather than send canned goods home with students.

"I can talk to them about our parenting programs. I can connect them to social service programs, help them with life skills," Murphy said. "Our goal is to get them in the door."

At the same time, the pantry clearly fills a need.

"We've had homeless families come through and get what they need when they're staying at a hotel," Murphy said. "People having trouble making ends meet is a little too prevalent in Sussex County. People think we're at the beach in a high-income area, and it's really not."

A great amount of the food given away to the hungry is stockpiled by the Food Bank of Delaware, which collects and sells food at low cost to nonprofits and churches.

The Delaware National Guard, in a yearlong campaign to collect food from soldiers and airmen, accumulated 17,000 pounds of food in 2014, a commander announced last week. It's an impressive haul, but about what the Food Bank distributes in a single day.

Slow recovery

Hickey, the St. Patrick's Center director, says he knows the economy is bouncing back. But in the Wilmington area, he says, it's hard to notice.

The center customarily asks its seniors to donate $2 when they come in for a hot lunch. When Hickey experimented by dropping the donation request, he says, three times the normal crowd showed up.

"So you have seniors who can't even afford $2 for a lunch," Hickey said. "For a lot of people, it's hard."

Beebe, with the Food Bank, says one of her organization's top goals for 2015 is to add workforce development programs in Wilmington, teaching the unemployed skills they could use in restaurant work. That's a program the Food Bank already runs in its Milford location.

Elaine Archangelo, director of Delaware's Division of Social Services, says her office's internal data on food aid demonstrate a leveling off in applications. She noted that the state, in September, chose to make a policy change about linked home-heating and food aid that had the effect of preserving SNAP benefits for many households that otherwise would have been bumped off.

"People who are maybe not the first to feel it are starting to maybe get the boost" of a recovering economy, Archangelo said. "The administration, and the department, are starting to see finally that the recovery is getting down to the community level and the client level."

But she said she expects no lessening of the need for charitable nonprofits that focus on hunger.

"People who are only off [SNAP] because of a slight increase in wage probably will continue to use resources like the Food Bank," she said. "We have to rely on the generosity of givers in our community to help."

Grygiel, of the Newark Senior Center, says she sees many clients who cobble together what they need from different aid groups.

"It's like a puzzle, putting it together," Grygiel said. "I think people really struggle to put that puzzle together to feed their families."

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com.

Useful links

AARP's benefits guide: aarp.org/quicklink

To donate to Meals on Wheels Delaware: mealsonwheelsde.org, 800-62-MEALS

To donate to the Food Bank of Delaware: fbd.org, 302-292-1305

For information about getting food aid or SNAP benefits, call Delaware 2-1-1 or 800-560-3372, or visit delaware211.org