Asheville Citizen Times Editorial: Joblessness threatens too many WNC families with hunger
Posted 04/19/11
Great editorial from the Asheville Citizen Times on April 14, 2011.Look all you want, because there isn’t one. Not because the problem has been fixed, but because elite opinion has instead coalesced around the concept that the deficit is the dragon of the day to be slain.
Here in reality, things are quite different. Unemployment and underemployment are huge challenges staring families in the face every single day.
People aren’t worried so much about the deficit as they are where their next meal is coming from. A glance at the Map the Meal Gap 2011 study, recently released by Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, paints a dismaying picture across the country and right here in Western North Carolina. The data is used by agencies such as MANNA FoodBank to help better target their relief efforts.
This year’s report shows a very large target indeed.
The number of residents facing “food insecurity’‘ — not knowing where their next meal is coming from at some point during the year — runs at 15.5 percent in Buncombe, making it one of the more fortunate counties in the region. Mitchell County’s food insecurity rate is 18.6 percent, Swain is at 19.9 percent, and Cherokee, McDowell and Graham counties all top 20 percent. In fact, Graham’s rate, 23.5 percent, means a quarter of the county has experienced food insecurity.
Cynthia Threlkeld, who has taken the reins as MANNA FoodBank’s new executive director, said, “There are children that honestly can’t live with the confidence that they are going to be able to have something to eat when they are hungry.”
MANNA serves 255 nonprofit member agencies in 16 WNC counties, helping provide enough food for 20,000 meals every day of the year.
Of the more than 9 million pounds of food that left MANNA’s warehouse last year, 6.5 million pounds were delivered outside of Buncombe County. Threlkeld said “Buncombe gets the attention, it’s the most populous center. But we (at MANNA) need to get out there and work on the capacity of our agencies. We need to give them freezers and refrigerators and coolers, and help them fundraise. We need to use our increased operational capacity and resources to help them with whatever deficiencies they may have as smaller, volunteer-driven organizations.”
Amid the startling numbers, there are undercurrents of disturbing trends. In Mitchell County, Centro Latino executive director Silvia Peterson said the working poor are leaning more heavily than ever on food assistance. “That’s pretty bad and pretty sad. I have heard it firsthand and I have seen it. There are people that just don’t make enough money to make but only one meal a day.”
Fact is, when wages are stagnant but prices are rising for fuel and health care, this is the situation we will find ourselves in.
That may explain the second disturbing trend. Warmer weather usually means more money for families no longer having to pay to heat their homes and thus a lessened demand on food banks, but that isn’t happening this year. Southern Reconciliation Ministries director John Miller says the need for food isn’t slackening in Yancey County.
“That’s kind of unnerving because usually at this point, we drop off pretty dramatically. That’s not happening yet this year.”
The final dismaying factor: The people who have generously provided assistance throughout this crisis are simply wearing out. What should be a temporary situation seems to be becoming a permanent fixture of life. Threlkeld said, “It seems like we were already on the edge. There really is a problem in the community and we need to find a way to address it. The whole issue of donor fatigue and compassion fatigue — that’s very real but it doesn’t mean that the needs aren’t continuing to creep up.”
This crisis isn’t anywhere near abating. We know that. People in our community know it, and they’re doing all they can to help.
We hope our leaders, living comfortably cocooned in a different reality, wake up to the fact that the economy isn’t fixed, and we haven’t moved on. The “rising tide’‘ lifted the boats on Wall Street.
Down here on Main Street, there is no rising tide, only wave after wave of troubling news.
