On the morning of Friday, March 13, Jennifer Schwabauer came into work after being away at a week-long leadership conference. In the office of Manna Food Bank, Schwabauer’s co-workers were standing around, drinking coffee and talking about how inconvenient it was that the wait to get into the local Costco was 90 minutes long, with a line wrapping around the store. Schwabauer was shocked.
“What happened?” she asked. She knew about the worldwide effects of the coronavirus, and a week earlier Manna began to take extra steps to wear gloves and to clean often, but she did not realize the virus had already infiltrated her own community. She did not understand how the panic spread to her quiet city of Thousand Oaks, California, so quickly. All she could think was “this is going to be interesting.”
The following Monday, Schwabauer went to work and realized that the effects of the coronavirus were immediate. Hospitals began to run out of masks and ventilators, small businesses closed indefinitely, and unemployment rose. It wasn’t like the 2008 recession, where things slowly escalated. When COVID-19 was named a pandemic, things snowballed fast, and everyone was being hit by the impact.
In both 2008 and 2020, increased unemployment led to more people needing federal assistance and free services. A big form of help comes from food banks and pantries, where low-income, homeless, or unemployed people can get food for free.
These food banks are mostly run by small staffs and volunteers, but with the coronavirus pandemic keeping people at home, volunteer membership has dropped. New social distancing guidelines in place are also forcing the operation of pantries to change. Strain is being placed on these essential services as they lose volunteers and gain visitors.
Schwabauer, 58, wasn’t worried about losing her job. She was thinking about everyone who was about to need her help. The executive director of Manna Food Bank in Thousand Oaks for the past seven years, Schwabauer spends her days working to provide free food for low-income people and families in her community.
With the pandemic causing unemployment to skyrocket across the US, more people were going to be coming to her for help. In March 2020, Manna served 723 people. Compared to March 2019, that was a 79 percent increase, with a 47 percent increase in first-time households seeking assistance.
Schwabauer showed the numbers to Manna’s board of directors in the first week of April. They agreed this was only beginning; pantry users would rise as the economy tanked.
Inside Manna Food Bank, as volunteers stock the shelves and make grocery bags. Photo courtesy of Katie Douglas.
Besides the increase of people in need, the first major change at Manna was the loss of most of its volunteers. Usually about 35 volunteers work in the pantry, but many are seniors who quit for their own safety.
Katie Douglas volunteers at the front desk, the first face that visitors to Manna see when they enter. For the past two years, Douglas, 47, has been volunteering at the pantry, going twice a week to help new visitors do the necessary paperwork to receive food, and confirming that they live in the Conejo Valley. Her main concern is the lack of volunteers and how that might lead to burnout for the remaining workers.
“There’s plenty of food right now,” Douglas says, “and we’re actually getting a good amount of donations, but that’s not the problem. It’s finding volunteers and following safety guidelines. How do you serve a population like this?”
Four volunteers work in the pantry at a time. Prior to the pandemic, a volunteer would take visitors into the pantry and let them pick out the foods they wanted. But with CDC guidelines and social distancing protocol being enforced, Manna’s normal operations have undergone changes.
Manna operates out of a small pale house in a residential neighborhood. It is indistinguishable from the other houses on the street, except for the sign above the door that says “Manna” and the van parked out front with the food bank’s logo. In front of the house is a purple wooden cart that says Feeding Your Mind, and painted on it are the words Think, Literacy, Books, Read, Dream.
Inside, every room is dedicated to the pantry. The front room has a computer for checking in visitors and taking donations, and the bedroom is Schwabauer’s office. The living rooms hold freezers and a refrigerator for eggs, dairy, meats, and produce, and shelves of canned items and dry goods line the walls of another room. Even the backyard has freezers on the covered porch.
Nearly 96 percent of the food comes from the community. Large donations come from food drives by the local Boy Scout troop and high schools. Bread is donated from Agoura’s Wildflour Bakery and dry goods are donated by Gelson’s market. Even during Los Angeles’s shelter-in-place order, people in the community manage to make in-person donations to Manna. It has become common for locals to drop off fruit from their own backyard, bringing fresh lemons, oranges, tangerines, and avocados picked from their gardens.
Now, a young redheaded volunteer walks up to the car sitting in the driveway outside Manna and hands the man inside a checklist that lists items ranging from cereal to soup to produce. People wait in their cars, checking off what they want so the volunteers can collect and bag their groceries inside the pantry. The volunteer comes back to the car window, takes the paper, and heads inside again. This has become the new system Manna uses to get visitors what they need without breaking social distancing rules.
Manna Food Bank, providing a visitor with groceries. Photo by Isabel Sami.
About five minutes pass before the volunteer comes outside pushing a shopping cart containing five big paper grocery bags. “Tim?” she calls. The door of the car parked in the driveway opens and Tim, a tall older gentleman, steps out. A blue mask covers his nose and mouth, and both people are wearing latex gloves. The volunteer says a few words to Tim before heading back into the pantry.
Alone, Tim loads the paper grocery bags from the shopping cart into the backseat of his small white Toyota, carrying the food that will last him for the next four weeks, until he can come back and get his next batch of groceries. When he is done, he gets back into his car, slowly backs out of the driveway, and leaves. Another car pulls into the freshly vacated spot. Inside the house, volunteers are seen through the open front door putting food into bags. A woman outside wears gloves as she wipes down carts in the driveway.
Thirty-five miles away in Santa Monica, the Westside Food Bank feeds an estimated 108,000 people annually across the northwest region of Los Angeles County, about a tenth of the region’s population of one million. In March there was a 20 percent increase in visits to the food bank due to the spread of layoffs as a result of the pandemic. Westside’s chief development officer Genevieve Riutort believes the number will double in the coming months as more people deal with the effects of unemployment.
Riutort, 48, was a victim of food insecurity herself. When raising her three kids as a single mother, Riutort depended on food pantries to feed her family, standing in line to get enough food for a few weeks. Now she has devoted her career to helping those in the same situation.
In her sixteen years working at Westside, Riutort has overseen operations of the food bank, which donates free food to over fifty agencies and pantries that offer services to homeless and low-income individuals and families. As of April 3, only nine of these agencies are operating, but even with fewer pantries to supply, Westside has nearly doubled the amount of food purchased since the pandemic began.
Inside the Westside Food Bank. Photo courtesy of Genevieve Riutort
On an average Los Angeles day, a couple workers from one of the partnering food pantries comes to the Westside Food Bank — essentially a warehouse full of canned goods, non-perishables and produce — once or twice a week depending on the demand and size of the pantry. It’s early in the morning, between five and seven, and the workers park their truck and walk into the building.
For the next hour, they pick through the pallets of bulk goods around them, loading up on cereals, pasta, bread, cans of beans, dairy, produce, and some meat. With a truck full of enough food to feed hundreds, they pack up and drive to their pantry to distribute their pickings.
At one such pantry supplied by Westside, the Inglewood Salvation Army, a staff of three runs operations. Lieutenant Heather Witcher, 52, and her husband Lieutenant Timothy Witcher, 52, spend three days a week packing bags of food for pantry visitors. When the pantry is closed, the couple and their son pack grab-bags for visitors to safely and quickly get food.
One type of grab-bag contains dry and canned goods: a loaf of bread donated by the local Whole Foods, canned beans and tomatoes, rice, pasta. The other type of bag has fresher items: mostly produce, maybe eggs, chicken if available.
The Witchers are a family dedicated to serving their community. They have a collection of regulars who come to the pantry, many of whom are seniors and families.
Heather wasn’t worried about making changes to the pantry, but with increased layoffs affecting youth and families, the number of people coming to the pantry has already grown significantly. A month ago Timothy went to the Westside Food Bank only once a week to stock up on food. Now, Timothy wakes up early twice a week, makes the 20-minute drive to Santa Monica, and loads his van with enough food for a few days.
Before the pandemic, the volunteer staff was larger. There were enough people to stock the shelves, help visitors, and take the weight off of the Witchers. However, like Manna Food Bank, most volunteers are seniors, and the safe decision was to relieve them of their duties and send them home until the pandemic subsides.
Riutort is more worried about safe food distribution and implementing social distancing than she is of a food shortage. The pantries are able to manage social distancing now, but she says that with more people coming in, visitors wait in line longer and distribution takes longer.
“That’s manageable with a small increase,” Riutort says. “Once you get to a 50, 60, 100 percent increase in the number of people, that’s when it starts to get unmanageable. Many of our member agencies are run entirely by volunteers, so they don’t necessarily have a full group of professional staff. We are really ramping up our efforts to step in and potentially provide some direct service to take some pressure off of these agencies.”
With higher demand but fewer food drive donations, Westside needed a new way to raise money. In March they implemented a Virtual Food Drive as part of their website, where people can donate online in a way that helps them visualize what their money can buy.
The page is categorized by canned goods, produce, dairy, and grains. One such donation option is 40 pounds of apples for $16. A prospective donor can see the options and decide that they want to give $16 to buy those apples for Westside, or maybe instead donate $10 to buy 20 pounds of spaghetti, enough to feed dozens of hungry families. This prompts people to give money, while Westside can still choose what goods to purchase with the donation.
“We just don’t have the capacity to receive small donations of food,” Riutort says. “What we need more than anything is funding so we can purchase by the truckload. Since we’ve had to really significantly increase our food purchases to deal with the increased need during the crisis, that’s the best way to help us because we’re going to run out of money and not be able to keep our warehouse stocked unless we get additional funding from the community.”
At Manna, Schwabauer understands that the people who come to the pantry for help, both new and returning, are panicked.
“They’re scared,” she says. “Not only do they have this decline in hours, if they’re hourly workers — and most of them are, and now that’s reduced their income or they’ve been laid off altogether — but they have that plus the coronavirus.
“So they’re concerned about being out and about in order to come to the pantry, but for them, they don’t have a choice. This is their resource for food. If their wages have been cut, they can’t afford to go to the grocery store. It’s a level of fear that I haven’t seen before, but they’re very grateful at the same time.”
Douglas, who interacts regularly with visitors, also sees how scared they are. She talks to families about how often they need to get food, and though Manna limits visitors to getting food once a month, they do not turn away those in dire need.
Overall, she feels that working in the pantry is rewarding. Sitting at the front desk, Douglas watches volunteers help visitors, and seeing small acts of kindness gives her hope.
One day in early April, Douglas was at the front desk when a family came in. When the parents asked Douglas a question, it was in Spanish. One of their two young sons interjected, translating his parents’ words into English. “We’re here for the food pantry,” he said.
“Have you been here before?” she asked.
The child looked up at his parents and relayed the question in Spanish. They answered, and he translated, “Yes, last month.”
After the family had been given their groceries, the boys saw Douglas stacking chairs and hurried to help her. Douglas says witnessing the humanity in people is one of the best parts of the job.
“People like to work at the food bank,” Riutort agrees. “We’re all very dedicated to the mission.” Her own connection to food assistance fuels her work. As a young, single mother with three little kids, couch surfing at friends’ houses and trying to figure out how she was going to make ends meet, not knowing how she was going to feed her kids scared her. Being able to access food pantries gave Riutort a huge sense of relief, and without having to worry about food she could focus on changing her life.
“For me, it’s really a personal mission of wanting to give other people that feeling of relief,” Riutort says. “If we can relieve that stress and make sure that they’re well-nourished, and that their kids are well-nourished and that the seniors are well-nourished, that’s a huge responsibility that we have,” she says. “And I think that’s why all of our staff has been around for so long, because we just love being a part of that.”
isabel sami 