The People’s Pantry is a Great Barrington, Massachusetts food bank that serves Southern Berkshire County. It connects those experiencing food insecurity to locally sourced produce and supplies from farms and other sources in the region. The explosion in need from community members due to the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying economic crisis has forced the pantry to hold a fundraiser for the first time in its 23-year history. Rees Shad sits on The People Pantry’s board. He spoke to WAMC.
SHAD: Our numbers have completely escalated. Pre pandemic, we were serving about 500 individuals a month. And that means, you know, maybe one person from a family comes to the pantry, but there are four people at home. So, that's where that number 500 would be. So, what those that are eventually serviced. But anyway, during the pandemic, that spiked up to 1,500 a month. And currently, it's 2,000 a month, just a little bit shy of 2,000 a month. Meanwhile, our expenses have spiraled very, very high between 2018 and 2021. Something like 500% increase in costs. So we need to do this fundraiser we call the “Help Us Fill The Bag” fundraiser.
WAMC: Now tell me what the kind of folks that you're seeing who come in for assistance at the pantry. Has that demographic changed at all with the corresponding rise in number of folks who are relying on the services of the pantry?
It's a very, very diverse population of clients. All sorts of folks have been hit by this, since the pandemic especially.
Now, the “Fill The Bag” fundraiser- walk me through this, what exactly are its objectives? How can folks get involved in it? What's the look of this campaign?
There's lots of different ways people can get involved with the pantry. They can volunteer their time to help us out. This is primarily a volunteer run organization. We literally have one part time employee, and our facilities are actually donated by St. James Place here in Great Barrington. So our overhead is really, really low in terms of administrative costs, and that's because we have so many wonderful people who help us out here. We're looking at probably having to serve between 24,000 and 25,000 people this year, and that's going to end up costing us somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000, is what our current estimates are. And that's what we're trying to raise for 2022.
Now, have you, in speaking with other folks in the world of food assistance in the Berkshires- This rise in dependence on a place like the pantry, is that something that you're hearing from other folks in that world?
Yeah, we're hearing it from all the other pantries that were associated with, I would say, across the board. Need has escalated tremendously. And of course, everybody is seeing an increase in their grocery bills. But we're also all seeing an increase in our electricity bills and our heat home heating costs. The cost of literally having a home or an apartment has skyrocketed. And so, they're- Just, it's there's so much more to take on. And on a fairly limited budget, it's more and more impossible. So that's, we're hearing it across the board from all the other food pantries and food service folks.
