In 1995 our publisher picked the Food Bank as the main charitable effort of our community newspapers, meaning the real reason for my writing about it for eight weeks is to raise money. Others might see a conflict in that, but I don”t.
As the journalist assigned to write about the Food Bank, I have never been given orders from on high to make the Food Bank look good. Instead, I have set out to make this nonprofit look, feel and taste real to the reader.
At a time when other major community institutions are failing, is this tell-all approach really the best idea?
Would it be better for us to simply beg readers for money, rather than tell them the good, bad and ugly that I see every week? After all, I haven”t even talked about a budget deficit of $25,000 the Food Bank likely faces for this year.
“While we have some reserves to help us through, we can”t sustain these kind of deficits for long. The biggest danger is that we may have to decrease the level of food support for our client families,” Food Bank Executive Director Nancy Severy tells me.
“Economic news varies from lousy to scary. With continuing high unemployment rates coupled with loss of funding for local social service agencies, it”s going to be a tough year.”
Personalizing a fundraising pitch using friends and neighbors I meet there is likely to be more interesting to readers than simply asking for money. But even that is subjective. I could ignore every unsavory character and write only about the upstanding mass of elderly people I run into every week.
“I … found that our typical senior client”s income is between $700 and $900 a month. Think about that for a minute. That doesn”t go very far,” Severy told me.
My instinct is that I should tell as much of the story as I possibly can. The truth will prevail even if it”s uglier than a polished pitch. For that reason I can”t leave out the mentally ill homeless who are served. In the end, despite our failings, telling the truth to the best of our ability is the triumph of newspapers.
This is much more than a story about a nonprofit that knows how to both stretch money and provide services. I”m struggling a little on how to explain the mystical bang you will get for your bucks in contributions.
I think of the biblical miracle of the endless loaves and fishes when I see more goodwill coming out of the Food Bank than going in. I asked Severy to help me explain what I mean, as she seems to be able to put it into words.
“The whole community has the right to feel proud of our food bank,” she said. “Approximately half our cash budget comes from local donations, large and small, as well as many tons of donated food annually. Somehow this has so much more meaning than the proverbial government hand out.” Not a day passes that several people don”t show up at the Food Bank door with a bag of groceries (obviously thoughtfully chosen), recycled grocery bags, hand-knitted caps, a bag of apples or a check. The giving of these donations is a deeply personal exchange.”
At a time when our society and planet are in awful declines, this “deeply personal exchange” is where the power lurks. Spending your money this way is much, much better than spending on stuff, better even than barter.
Donations to the Food Bank provide life at several levels, for food that would have been thrown away, blessings for the receiver, and keeping retired and neglected poor people from feeling like they have been thrown away.
“We also have depended greatly on local private donations and so far our wonderful community has seen us through,” Severy said. “We just hope that the bottom-line nature of our service to the community continues to be recognized. The Food Bank is where people go when it all comes crashing down and other safety nets disappear.”
The facts
The Food Bank”s clientele grows every year. Two years ago, a huge increase came when the economy and real estate market fell precipitously in that fearsome October 2008.
“We greatly need the continued support of the community. The recession brought a big jump in the number of clients who come to us for help,” Severy said. “It doesn”t look like we”re likely to return to pre-recession levels anytime soon, if ever. We need to keep finding enough food to fill the weekly food bags that sustain our clients.”
For reasons still unclear, there was a big Thanksgiving rush, with many more families, seniors and people living over the edge arriving than expecting.
“We need more donations for Christmas. Usually after Thanksgiving we have a hundred or more turkeys in the freezer for Christmas, but this year our Thanksgiving distribution was bigger than ever. We distributed about 780 turkeys with the fixings for a holiday meal — up about 100 compared with last year,” Severy said.
Federal stimulus funding will soon be a thing of the past, we all know. The Food Bank has benefited from USDA stimulus spending that gave farmers and food processors jobs, then gave high quality food to food banks.
And the Food Bank has benefited from a federal court settlement in which fines paid by a syndicate of big corporations that illegally monopolized the world vitamin market were directed to food banks to buy good nutritious foods like brown rice and fresh vegetables.
While the USDA will continue to provide lots of food, future funding from the County of Mendocino also seems bleak.
“We have received modest, much-needed support through the county. But, given local and county budgets around the state, we are concerned about the future of this funding source,” Severy said.
So the need for money is there now and figures to get much larger with the probable loss of three forms of government aid.
Season of Sharing
This series goes hand-in-glove with the Advocate-News” and The Mendocino Beacon”s annual Season of Sharing fund drive for the Food Bank. The goal is to give the Food Bank money it can use year-round, not just during the holidays.
Last year, $21,890.29 was donated, which brought the total raised since our first fund drive in 1995 to $185,890.
The nonprofit Community Foundation of Mendocino County administers the Season of Sharing free of charge as a courtesy to the newspapers. Every cent taken in by the newspapers goes to the Food Bank.
Checks should be made out to the Community Foundation of Mendocino County (CFMC), and mailed to the newspaper at P.O. Box 1188, Fort Bragg, 95437, or dropped off at 450 N. Franklin St. If you have any questions, call us at 964-5642.
The fundraiser runs through Dec. 31. Donors” names are printed each week, unless they ask to remain anonymous.
As of Tuesday, donations totaled $4,920. With the Food Bank, this week we thank David and Laura Welter, Janice Boyd, F. Ben and Nancy Housel, Michael and Jan Tolmasoff, Andrew Klacik and one anonymous donor.
