By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Here’s a trick question: What items does our local Jewish food bank always need because they can’t keep enough on hand? Need a hint? It’s not food.
“Toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, soap,” lists off Carol Mullin, director of emergency services at Jewish Family Service. “We could spend so much money every single month, and we do spend so much money every single month. But it’s not enough.”
Given the number of people who visit JFS’s food bank — on average more than 1,800 individuals per month, an 18 percent increase over just a year ago, with a record 1,375 households served this past June — even a $2 bottle of shampoo for each client can take a significant chunk out of the purchasing budget.
The increase in demand for toiletries and food, Mullin said, is not a surprise.
“When we look at the unemployment figures, they’re huge,” she said. Given that the Seattle area was hit later than most of the country, “we’re really in the peak of the recession with a lot of the families in need.”
Couple that with about half of JFS’s Polack Food Bank clients being fixed-income seniors or adults with disabilities, and she doesn’t foresee a decrease in demand in the immediate future.
That’s the bad news.
The good news, she said, is that the community is responding. In the past year, donations of food and non-perishable goods have increased 67 percent — or by nearly 68 tons. When the annual food drive begins on Sept. 29, just in time for the High Holidays, they hope to increase that number even more.
As they do every year, JFS volunteers have joined with synagogues and local organizations to set out large donation boxes in lobbies and at sanctuaries, and they have given out thousands of paper bags so people can fill them with nonperishable items.
Several of the larger synagogues will have trucks waiting on Yom Kippur so donors can drop the bags off directly, and then, early on the morning of Oct. 9, those trucks will unload the goods at a Sodo warehouse so hundreds of community members can sort, box and stack what makes up about 20 percent of the food the agency gives out over the course of the year. The remainder comes from community donations, gets purchased outright, or partnerships with Food Lifeline and Northwest Harvest, hunger-alleviating organizations that act as an umbrella donor for food banks throughout the Puget Sound region.
Donated foods do not have to be specifically kosher, since many of the people receiving the food are not Jewish, but the more kosher food that gets donated means more options for a program JFS started earlier this year: Distribution of kosher food, inspected beforehand by a mashgiach, or kashrut inspector.
The mashgiach, Shaul Gallor, approached JFS about creating this opportunity for observant families after a conversation a year ago with his mother about people in his own community having trouble affording food.
“I couldn’t believe such a thing existed in our community,” Gallor said. “How can that be and how can we not do anything about it?”
The food bank received Gallor’s proposal with open arms and the monthly program was up and running in under two months.
“Before he did this program, families who keep kosher, they wouldn’t be able to get kosher chicken, not kosher cheese,” said Avital Eidenbom of the Va’ad HaRabbanim of Greater Seattle, one of the several agencies for whom Gallor does inspections. “It’s on his own time, he doesn’t get compensated. Everything he’s done to create the program has been on his own.”
JFS purchases the kosher meat and dairy goods to ensure it has enough on hand for the families that sign up to receive the food.
About 30–40 percent of the food kosher clients receive is fresh produce, about the same amount all food bank clients now receive after the food bank’s expansion a year and a half ago that included a walk-in refrigerator to store the perishables.
The bulk of the produce comes from either purchasing or its umbrella partners. But JFS has also cultivated partnerships with farmers at the Broadway Farmers Market to glean their fruits and vegetables. It makes sense, given their location.
“We’re beginning to have more of a presence as the neighborhood food bank on Capitol Hill,” Mullin said.
That relationship, which began earlier this year, will last for the seven months each year the market is open, and has thus far netted about 8,000 pounds of produce valued at approximately $20,000.
But a small amount of that produce comes from another Jewish source: A garden on the grounds of a rental property owned by Congregation Beth Shalom in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood. Synagogue member Susan Monas started a garden outside of the preschool a couple years ago, and then expanded it.
“We had eight beds, and we didn’t need [the harvest], and I just thought, there are lots of needy people,” Monas said. “Why not be able to make a contribution?”
Earlier this summer synagogue members picked about 40 pounds of lettuce, radishes, broccoli and other vegetables to bring to the food bank, which added on to the 60 or so pounds gleaned and donated last year.
A portion of the food and toiletries JFS collects is used in a home delivery program in conjunction with the City of Seattle to an additional 400 clients. Funding that previously came through from the Federal Emergency Management Agency was eliminated, which means JFS will need to make up those dollars, but Mullin said her food bank was much less affected than several others in the area. She said JFS would weather those cuts, but, as always, alternate sources would need to be found.