In a land of abundance, the lack of access to food is not just a problem for people who are unemployed or homeless.
Those on the front lines of the war on hunger say the real issue is that many people are finding themselves in tenuous financial circumstances.
“I see first-timers every day. So many people are one paycheck away from needing assistance,” said Linda Keenan, director of development at the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties. “There’s plenty of food in this country. That’s the hard thing. … There’s plenty of food, but people do not have the means to access that food.”
Keenan, speaking at Hunger in Monmouth — the 47th annual convention of the League of Women Voters of Monmouth County — on June 16, told attendees that 62 percent of the Neptune-based nonprofit’s clients work one or more jobs.
“We’re seeing the numbers grow, too. We have not seen a turnaround at all,” Keenan said, adding that the “face of hunger” has changed to include the “working poor.”
The FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties serves one in 10 residents in the two counties, Keenan said. That represents 132,000 individual clients, 40,000 of whom are children.
Some of the services the FoodBank offers include the Backpack Program, which provides four meals per weekend to 650 students across 25 school districts who would otherwise go hungry.
The FoodBank also hosts a culinary school for adults, which has produced 300 graduates, providing them not only with the knowledge of how to prepare healthy meals for their families, but also job-ready training in the culinary arts.
Margaret Rizzo, volunteer coordinator at the Red Bank nonprofit, Lunch Break, said the level of need within local communities is easy to underestimate, and people are often unaware that their neighbors are struggling. “We can’t know where the hunger is,” Rizzo said at the meeting held at the Eastern Branch of the Monmouth County Library in Shrewsbury. “We look at our neighbors and we think that everything is okay, but we don’t know what is going on behind closed doors.”
According to Rizzo, Lunch Break has experienced a rise in the demand for assistance throughout Monmouth County, as well.
In 2014, the number of hot meals Lunch Break served increased by 55 percent over 2010 levels, Rizzo said. In addition, food pickups from the pantry increased 338 percent.
Lunch Break has expanded services beyond daily meals served at the soup kitchen and grocery pantry in Red Bank, including the establishment of Clara’s Closet for clothing donations, Rizzo said.
By accessing a network of about 300 feeding programs, including Lunch Break, Keenan said the FoodBank helped provide more than 10 million meals to families in need last year.
However, she added that it is not enough merely to provide food to families in need. The real problem, she said, is that they lack sufficient resources.
“We can give food because we want families to get back on their feet, but we also want to help families in other ways,” Keenan said.
She said those efforts include everything from helping people apply to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which made $4.6 million in assistance available to 1,500 of the FoodBank’s clients last year, to providing free-of-charge income tax returns, which garnered $2.1 million in refunds for 1,500 families, saving them $303,000 this past tax season.
According to a report issued in April by the Food Research and Action Center, New Jersey ranked 28th out of all 50 states in access to food for low-income families.
The Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), which compiled the 2015 Kids Count report examining childhood poverty, determined that childhood poverty levels have risen across the state for five consecutive years.
“Statewide, one-third of New Jersey children live in families that are considered low-income,” Cecilia Zalkind, executive director of ACNJ, said when the report was released.
Keenan said she believes a combination of education programs and community support could help address the growing need and — with luck and increased access to decent paying jobs — potentially start to turn things around.
Despite the booming need, Rizzo said it’s the individual successes that keep her devoted to Lunch Break and working to stem the tide of hunger.
She recalled her reaction when a youngster pulled her aside and told her, “If it wasn’t for Lunch Break, my family would starve.”
“For an eighth-grader to say something like that, it means that they’re being touched,” Rizzo said. “We’re trying very hard to increase the amount of people that we’re helping.”