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(upbeat music) (indistinct chattering) (bell rings) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that helped democracy thrive.

It's Friday, January 6th and I'm Kristen Baird Adams, president of the City Club board of directors.

I'm pleased to introduce today's forum, which is our annual forum on the leadership of the greater good.

It's also part of our local heroes series, which spotlights champions here in northeast Ohio whose hard work changes the way we view ourselves and our community.

So it's certainly fitting that we welcome today's speaker, Kristin Warzocha, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

In fiscal year 2022, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank served nearly 350,000 people in its six county service area.

Including tens of thousand approximately 90,000 or so who were individuals in need of food assistance for the very first time.

The food bank was one of many organizations in our community that was profoundly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

With ever-changing shutdowns, economic downturns, job uncertainty, more Ohioans faced food insecurity.

Suddenly, dramatically more families had to make impossible decisions.

Do I buy my medications this month or groceries?

Do I pay my rent on time or do I feed my family?

These questions and the root causes of food insecurity kept and continue to keep Kristin Warzocha in the extraordinary Greater Cleveland Food Bank team busy each day.

They work tirelessly and I would say heroically, to ensure that families in northeast Ohio have nutritious food that they need not only to survive, but to thrive.

Since its founding in 1979, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank has assisted those struggling with food insecurity.

One in six people in the food bank's service area, are food insecure.

That includes one in four elderly who are food insecure.

Let's think about that.

This paired with Cleveland's high poverty, high childhood poverty rate means that our community is more dependent than ever before on the life changing work of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

In fiscal year 2022, the organization distributed more than 48 million pounds of food.

And as you'll hear today, it has embarked on groundbreaking in innovative initiatives, designed not only to effectively address food insecurity, but as important to do all that it can to eliminate it.

Kristin Warzocha joined the Greater Cleveland Food Bank in 2000.

After serving as its vice president of external affairs, she became the CEO in 2014.

Before joining the food bank, Kristin spent four years with the Cleveland Chapter of the American Red Cross.

She's a graduate of John Carroll University.

As the leader of the largest hunger relief organization in northeast Ohio.

Kristin and her team work diligently to engage with the community about the food bank's critical work.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet your questions @thecityclub.

And the City Club staff will do its best to work it into the second half of our program.

Members, friends and guests of the City Club, it is my honor to introduce Greater Cleveland Food Bank CEO and president Kristin Warzocha.

(audience applauding) - Good afternoon.

(audience laughing) Good afternoon.

(all laughing) And thank you for being here at the City Club today to talk about the issue of hunger in our community.

There are so many friends and familiar faces in the room as well as people watching and listening from afar that I worry, I may be preaching to the choir.

(audience laughing) But it's an interested and intelligent and engaged choir.

And I'm so glad to share the work of the Greater Cleveland Community and our partners with you today.

Thank you Dan and Kristen and everyone associated with the City Club of Cleveland for this opportunity.

So they tell me this is the hero series.

And I like to start by saying that I am no hero.

I'm a nearly 52 year old mom, wife, daughter, and food banker who gets the incredible privilege and responsibility of helping people for a living.

I've had the honor of doing this for my entire career.

And for the last 22 years doing it with amazing colleagues and partners at the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

It's been difficult but also impactful work.

And I do it surrounded by a dedicated team and a smart, talented board of community leaders who care deeply about our mission.

Many of them are here with me today.

Can I ask all of our board, our former board and our Greater Cleveland staff in the room to please stand?

(all applauding) We also do this in partnership with tens of thousands of northeast Ohioans.

From the volunteers and staff who lead in support are more than 1000 partner programs across six counties.

Serving people on the front lines in the fight against hunger each and every day.

To our food and financial donors who give so generously to ensure that our partner distribution hub is full of nutritious food.

And from our volunteers who help repackage that food in our warehouse, make it into meals in our onsite production kitchen or share their talents with committee service.

To our elected officials who roll up their sleeves, sometimes literally to provide food and support.

It truly takes a village to do what we do.

The Greater Cleveland Food Bank is part of a national network of food banks 199 Strong who are members of Feeding America.

Together, we serve every county in the United States.

12 of these Feeding America food banks are in Ohio.

And they are wonderful collaborators in our efforts.

While we're all separate nonprofits and we all approach our work a little bit differently, we find strength and learning and support from each other and from our network.

Now, all of this work, of course is on behalf of, and in collaboration with the men, women and children we collectively serve whose numbers have grown these past few years.

In 2019, we worked together with our partner agencies to provide food to more than 300,000 individuals in our community.

In 2020, that number grew to more than 400,000 in large part because of the pandemic.

In 2021, the number began to come back down.

People were going back to work, they were finding more stability.

And then sadly in January of 2022, we saw the numbers begin to tick back up because the higher costs of living and the impact of inflation.

I visited one of our partners just this week and the director told me that they set new all time records in November and December of this year for the number of clients turning to them for help.

For a lot of people the last couple of years have been a wild ride.

And for food banks and our partners, it has been no different.

So March of 2020 may forever be etched in our minds at the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

And I suspect that it is for many of you as well.

On March 9th of that year, the first case of Covid in Ohio was confirmed by our governor Mike DeWine.

Almost immediately, our volunteers began canceling the work schedules.

We rely on tens of thousands of volunteers a year.

Sometimes hundreds a day, to help with our work at the food bank.

Corporate groups, school groups, retirees, families and others help in our warehouse and production kitchen getting donated food ready for distribution.

In the first two weeks after the pandemic began, 1400 volunteers canceled their shifts.

Additionally, donated food and it seemed like overnight began to plummet.

It dropped by more than 40%.

Food banks rely on donations from the food industry.

And much of that food is surplus product.

But when Americans who could afford to ran to the grocery store to stock their own pantry or their basement freezer, leaving shelves at local supermarket bare, it meant that there wasn't much left for food banks.

Then our partner agencies began closing for safety.

We provide food to people at libraries, at schools, at senior centers, at community sites.

And at one point, more than 300 of our 1000 partners had closed.

And of course at the time food insecurity was skyrocketing.

People were losing their jobs, they were having hours cut, children were missing out on free and reduced price meals at school.

And low income seniors were terrified to leave their homes for fear of catching COVID.

They needed help and we needed to figure out how to get them help.

So we activated our internal disaster response team.

Now, we did have a disaster plan, albeit not one with a pandemic plan built in.

(all laughing) But staff representing every function at the food bank began meeting daily in our community room.

In homemade masks, six feet apart to plan to respond and to problem solve.

Now, we didn't have all the answers, but we did know what needed to be done.

And day by day our team showed up and they figured it out.

And they were so impressive.

I have never been so proud.

We simply couldn't close.

Too many people were depending on us.

So we let the community know through our media partners that we needed money to buy food.

And we started buying food by the truckload wherever we could get it.

Supply chain issues made this really difficult, but our team worked incredibly hard and the community made it possible.

We turned our monthly produce distribution at the food bank into a drive through distribution.

We knew we couldn't bring the up to a thousand people, many of them senior citizens who typically visited us on a monthly basis into our facility.

So we wound them around the building so that we could put boxes of food in their trunks.

So the first drive-through was far from perfect.

But it was so busy that we decided to do another one the next week.

And by the next week, the turnout was so enormous that we had traffic helicopters hovering overhead reporting on the extraordinary traffic phenomenon that was shutting down the eastbound Shoreway.

It was thousands and thousands of people coming to us for food.

In lines, miles long in every direction.

I will always remember talking to a mom in line.

She had her kids in the backseat and she was in tears.

She told me so proudly that she'd always been able to get by.

She'd never before needed help.

But she worked in a downtown hotel by day and she Ubered by night.

And both of those jobs had just dried up.

And while she was embarrassed, she was also so grateful.

And the fact is that that story played out time and time and time again over the course of the pandemic.

So we pulled our outreach team.

Folks were usually out in the community connecting people to public benefits and other resources onto the phones in our help center.

As the number of calls from northeast Ohioans in need of help, many for the first time grew from about 100 a day to 800 a day.

Now, every food bank in Ohio and frankly across the nation was struggling with similar challenges.

So we had an emergency meeting of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks on a Sunday.

And we asked the governor to send in the National Guard.

We needed help to do the work of the volunteers we lost to supplement the work of our paid staff and to help us respond to Covid.

And he said yes without hesitation.

On March 23rd, Ohio's stay-at-home order went into effect, and just a few days later, our first group of National Guard soldiers pulled into our parking lot in they're Humvees and full military uniforms.

(audience laughing) Now I watched them roll in from an upstairs window in our facility and I thought, who the heck is in charge now?

(all laughing) And the answer was that we were.

Captain Tony told me on day one that our job was to tell them what we needed and their job was to get it done.

And so we did and they did together.

Food banks were the first organizations in the state to get help from the National Guard at the onset of Covid, and they were a godsend.

Those soldiers brought their heads, their hands, and to their hearts to the job.

They were able to be stationed locally, sleep in their own beds at night and serve their own communities.

And many of them shared stories about growing up and needing at some point in their young life emergency food.

They were serving in some cases their very own neighborhoods.

And that meant the world to them.

Over the next couple of weeks, we moved our drive through distribution to a much larger space in the Muni Lot.

Started doing home deliveries to people running out of food at home and unable to get out.

We officially moved in to our new partner distribution hub just in time for the holidays.

(audience applauding) So you may ask, where are we today?

Well, eventually after about 15 months, the National Guard ended their time at our food bank and at food banks across the state.

Now we were lucky enough to hire a few of them.

They have been fabulous.

We began to welcome volunteers back into the building with redesign projects and space for social distancing.

And our programmatic partners who had been forced to close their doors at the onset of the pandemic began to reopen.

Now, we have never had to pivot the way we did when the pandemic hit.

But we have learned so much about flexibility, about teamwork and about service.

Our solutions are bigger than our challenges.

I know this because I've witnessed it firsthand.

And we can bring these learnings forward.

The experience of responding to Covid has changed how we will approach solving hunger now and for years to come.

And that will serve us well.

While we're in a new stage of the pandemic, inflation is causing additional challenges.

Through the summer and early fall of 2022, and this holiday season, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank served more people than we have in history.

Because of rising food, fuel, utilities and housing expenses.

We're all failing it one way or another.

The average American household is spending $433 more a month to buy the same goods and services it did a year ago according to a Moody's analysis on October inflation data.

If you're a struggling family on a tight budget or a senior citizen on a fixed income, these added expenses present incredibly difficult choices day-to-day.

And they are an extraordinary challenge.

So while we respond, we also look ahead.

Our board recently voted to approve a new strategic plan.

Which will help us use our new capacity to bring our mission to life in the future.

Our mission is to ensure that everyone in our communities has nutritious food they need every day.

And while it's been our mission for a long time, it has always served us well.

It's aspirational in nature.

When we say everyone in every day, it always keeps us moving forward.

Our new strategic plan outlines three big goals, all very much in line with our mission.

Working to end hunger today, tomorrow and for a lifetime.

The first goal is to end hunger today with good old-fashioned food banking.

Using our new larger partner distribution hub on quite road to reach more income eligible people with more nutritious food and partnership with our network.

People like Alfreda.

Once a month, she takes transportation provided by her senior living building to pick up fresh produce at the Sterling Recreation Center.

Alfreda is 70 years old.

She uses a wheelchair and a cane.

So she isn't able to get to the grocery store as often as she'd like to pick up the fresh produce that she loves.

She also has diabetes and MS.

So a healthy diet is really important.

And she's on a tight budget.

She retired from the telephone company, she told us.

But she's living in a small pension and Social Security.

Her rent went up by $200 a month, but her income didn't.

She said when she goes to a produce distribution and sees all of the fresh free fruits and vegetables available that she feels like a kid in a candy store.

And the fresh produce she takes home saves her money so she can pay her other bills.

There are many more Alfredas out there who need us.

The second goal is to end hunger tomorrow by providing income eligible people with access to public benefits to provide short term stability.

SNAP once known as Food Stamps, is our nation's first line of defense against hunger.

The permanent version of the SNAP program began in 1964 with a goal of strengthening the agricultural economy while also providing low income households with access to nutritious food.

It's evolved over its nearly 60 years of existence into an incredibly effective program that provides food to those most vulnerable to hunger.

In 2021, four in five households receiving SNAP included a child, a senior or an individual with a disability.

Its reach is far and wide.

Providing nine times the number of meals of every food bank in the country together.

SNAP has the added benefit of supporting local farmers and grocers, including those in low income neighborhoods.

11 years ago, we realized that there were more than 60,000 people in our community who were income eligible for the program but not enrolled in it.

So we began outreach efforts, stationing colleagues at our partners and in other locations like bus stops to let people know that the benefit was available and to help them apply.

Now, while SNAP doesn't typically provide enough food for the entire month, it may provide food for a couple of weeks.

And that provides some stability to folks who really need it.

So take Kathy for example.

Now today Kathy is a dedicated donor and volunteer at our Euclid Neighborhood Pantry.

And she personally understands how helpful SNAP can be for a struggling family.

When she was younger, recently divorced, and with two kids under the age of five at home, she herself was having a hard time getting by.

Someone she knew told her about the Food Stamp program at the time and helped her apply.

She received the benefit for three months until she found a job.

And she still appreciates decades later that she had access to it.

She was on them for such a short period of time, and yet they really helped Kathy and her kids.

And she feels so strongly that no child in the US should be hungry.

I know you all agree.

And she shows that every day through her volunteerism at the food bank.

Being enrolled in SNAP and knowing that you can take your SNAP EBT card to your local grocery store at a time that works for you and buy food that your family needs relieves an incredible level of stress and allows you to focus on the next big challenge.

In Kathy's case, it was finding a job.

So the third goal is to end hunger for a lifetime by creating a national model to provide outstanding access to wraparound services to address the underlying causes of food insecurity.

Ultimately at the food bank, we want to serve everyone who needs us.

And we want fewer people to need us.

A good paying job is one of the best solutions to food insecurity.

But oftentimes other challenges get in the way.

One of the wonderful things, the many wonderful things about Greater Cleveland is how many organizations there are out there to help people.

So a number of years ago, we began to refer our clients struggling with other issues to talented and effective nonprofits who could help them.

Through this work, we found that sometimes this referral process was successful ending food insecurity for a family.

And sometimes it wasn't.

For a busy mom working at a low paying hourly job with small kids to care for, there's not always time in the schedule to get to a social service agency during normal business hours to ask for help.

So our new community resource center will help address that.

In November, as part of our expansion efforts, we began renovating our former distribution center on South Waterloo Road in the Collinwood Neighborhood into a one-stop shop to address the root causes of food insecurity and poverty.

In addition to offering people in need of assistance a big bright choice food pantry, open evening and weekend hours for working families, designed like a grocery store and full of healthy food.

We will be co-locating and collaborating with other nonprofit partners who are experts at solving problems associated with employment, housing, healthcare, the most frequent drivers of food insecurity as well as other challenges families face.

We've asked our community and our clients for input.

And we're pleased to have a wonderful list of partners who will be on site when the renovated space opens in the fall of this year.

CHN Housing Partners towards employment, shoes and clothes for kids, MetroHealth, United Way 211, legal aid, family connections and magnet.

And we're still in talks with a few others finalizing plans.

These collaborations are so exciting to contemplate.

As collectively, our organizations can be even more effective in helping people.

At our new community resource center, we can help people like Monica.

Last March, Monica was working full-time in a local call center.

Recently widowed.

She was raising her college-aged daughter alone at a job with no paid time off, making $10 an hour and living paycheck to paycheck.

That's $20,800 a year.

Slightly above Ohio's minimum wage of 930 an hour.

Now the minimum wage just went up to 1010 an hour, which is movement in the right direction.

And while I'm happy to see it moving, the fact is it is still not enough.

Monica was working full-time and she was still struggling to pay for groceries and other basic bills.

She went to a doctor's appointment at MetroHealth where she was screened for food insecurity and other social determinants of health.

And then referred to the food bank.

She was connected to Dia in our help center, who gave her a list of food pantries in our neighborhood.

Registered her for a distribution in the Muni Lot.

And helped her get a working stove for her home.

She did all of this over the phone.

Now, Monica believe it or not, made too much money to be eligible for SNAP because she made more than 130% of poverty.

But Dia was able to help her with utility assistance.

And once they got to know each other better, Dia told her about a higher paying job at the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

(audience laughing) (audience applauding) Today, Monica is a bilingual help center specialist answering calls from other people who are struggling.

And using her lived experience to provide connections to food and other support.

It's a full-time job paying more than 200% of poverty.

So she's no longer eligible for emergency food.

But more importantly, she no longer needs it.

She certainly sees and feels the impact of inflation, but she's on a budget and able to make things work.

She has good affordable health insurance, paid time off and a job where she is making a difference.

Over time, we have intentionally raised our own food bank minimum wage.

And that's on principle.

Because no one who works a full-time job, she have to leave work at the end of their shift, worrying about whether or not they're going to be able to afford groceries.

Monica is a blessing to the food bank and to our community.

And being connected to other nonprofits brought her to us.

At our new community resource center, we can connect tens of thousands of people a year to better paying jobs, better housing, better healthcare and other services.

Helping them rise out of food insecurity and poverty through collaboration.

And once this space opens next fall, we'll be looking to open two additional, smaller but similar locations on the west and south sides of our service area.

Because at the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, we are tired of living and working in the poorest big city in the nation.

So we're gonna do something about it together.

I hope you'll join us.

(audience applauding) - We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

(audience applauding) We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Kristen Baird Adams, president of the City Club Board of Directors, and we are joined today by Kristin Warzocha, president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

We welcome questions from all City Club members, guests, students and those joining us via our livestream @cityclub.org, where our radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question, please tweet at @thecityclub.

You can also text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And our staff will do its best to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

- [Man] Can you talk about your experience working with immigrants and refugees?

- Sure, I'd be happy to.

So at the Greater Cleveland Food Bank we wanna make sure that everyone in our community who has food needs it.

Regardless of their background, their country of oregon, origin, pardon me.

Or their status.

And so we work pretty hard to be connected in the community and to try to find areas of need.

I'll say Global Cleveland has been a wonderful partner to us, which we have appreciated.

And back when we were seeing a lot of Ukrainian refugees enter the US and Cleveland specifically, our outreach team was very involved in all of the community meetings in Parma and in other parts of our community to try to figure out what we could do to help.

And also if there were special types of food that we could provide that would be most helpful.

Now, sometimes there's something we can do specifically, and many times we're doing this work through our network of partner agencies who are already out there in nearly every neighborhood across Northeast Ohio.

(indistinct) - All right, I'll go.

All right.

Hi, good afternoon Kristin.

Thank you so much, and you are a hero.

So thank you so much for you and what you do at the food bank.

So my question is, when you look at the the pandemic, you've seen organizations respond to the pandemic and be more flexible in terms of rules and flexibility.

And it feels as if people are going back or organizations are going back to kind of the way things were.

How do you maintain the sense of urgency on this particular issue in a post, hopefully post pandemic environment?

- Well, thank you.

Thanks for that question and great to have you here today.

I think it's our mission that drives us forward, right?

I mean, our stated goal is to ensure that everyone in our community has access to nutritious food they need every day.

And so until we get there, until we serve everyone who needs it, we're always gonna be trying to move forward.

Our responsibility is very clear.

And we've got an amazing team and board who stays highly motivated, and I think really understands the urgency of the issue of hunger.

Because when somebody is hungry, it is a crisis, right?

It needs to be addressed right away.

It's not something that can wait until we get around to it.

So a longtime food banker who used to run the food bank in Oklahoma always used to say, "A hungry man has no other problems."

And it's true, right?

I mean, if you are worried about where your next meal is coming from, if your stomach is growling, if you don't know how you're gonna feed your kids tonight, kind of every other issue, it dissolves in the background, right?

And so we feel a real responsibility to try to make sure that fewer people in our community have to live with that and make those tough choices.

- I agree that you're a hero, Kristin.

- Stop Sandra.

(everybody laughing) - And so is every other person who comes up to this microphone.

So you ended by saying, but we're tired.

And as I was listening to this story, I was thinking about the toll that the pandemic had on your workforce and what it does when you're in disaster mode for three.

And we all know it was more than three months.

Can you talk to us about the toll that this took on your employees and your team.

And we know they rallied, we know they were phenomenal, but that comes at a cost.

And what's the state of the workforce at the food bank now?

- Yep.

So raise your hand if you're on our staff.

There we go, raise them high.

(audience applauding) Our people are amazing.

They're absolutely amazing.

They are so committed to our work.

They're so motivated by our work and they have new ideas all the time.

And the pandemic was hard, right?

It's when a disaster strikes and it was mentioned earlier, before I came to the food bank I worked for the Red Cross.

And so I had the chance to go out on disaster assignments.

And they're incredibly intense and they're 24 hours a day 'cause you're trying to solve all these problems in real time.

But they come to an end, right?

I might have flown in for a couple of weeks into community struggling in real crisis, but then eventually I flew home and somebody else flew in, right?

And even for that community, while it might take a long time to respond the disaster crisis itself was a little more time limited than a year's long pandemic.

(Kristin laughs) And when we first got into this, I mean, I believed everything I was being told about like that curve.

Do you remember that curve?

(audience laughing) The COVID rates are gonna go up and they're gonna come back down, right?

So when I called the city of Cleveland, Darnell Brown and said, "Darnell, could we use the Muni Lot for a little while?"

(Kristin laughs) I really meant a little while, right?

I thought it'd be a couple of months over the course of this curve.

And we now have been using the Muni Lot for two and a half years, and we're still there, because the need is still there.

So it has been tiring.

Our folks God, they have stayed at it.

A couple of folks have moved on.

But our team is just great, right?

And we're doubling down on encouraging vacation time.

And time off at the holidays and wellness and all of the other things we try to do.

But at their core they're food bankers, and it's just a privilege to work with them.

We'll keep trying to fund opportunities for rest.

(Kristin laughs) - I have two very basic questions.

what is food insecurity?

And is there a link between food insecurity and obesity?

And if so, why?

Thank you.

- Sure.

So what is food insecurity?

I mean, at the most basic level, food insecurity is not necessarily knowing where your next meal will be coming from, right?

And there are two nationally recognized food insecurity screening questions, essentially about do you worry you're gonna run out of food?

Or have you ever run out of food and not had enough money to buy more, right?

So that's how we define food insecurity.

Thanks for asking that question.

And what we know about working with clients for years and what the national data tells us is that food insecurity is linked to a very long list of health challenges, chronic health conditions, certainly diabetes, but also hypertension, cancer, your risk of cancer is higher if you're food insecure.

Sometimes food insecurity has even more of an impact than poverty on hunger issues.

And I have talked to a lot of clients particularly, working poor families who settle, right?

For the least expensive food in the supermarket 'cause that's what they can afford, right?

Ramen noodles and boxed mac and cheese and other high carb items, high processed items are frankly just the least expensive.

And I'll tell you what, there's nothing my kids would rather eat than ramen noodles in boxed mac and cheese, right?

And so it has the added benefit of pleasing your kids.

Broccoli does not do that.

So sometimes we do see obesity with folks who are food insecure because they've been reeling on this food that is just not very nutritional and they've been reeling on it for a long time.

And that's one of the reasons that we have put such a focus into distributing more fresh fruits and vegetables.

When food banking started 40 plus years ago, it was really almost all non-perishable food, right?

It was boxes and cans.

But that has really changed over the years.

And when we moved into our food distribution center on South Waterloo, one of the most wonderful things about that space was the additional cooler and freezer space we had because we could use it to distribute more perishable food.

And we did.

I mean we tripled our distribution in the time we were at that facility.

And we were able to significantly increase the fresh produce we distribute.

And so today two-thirds of what we distribute is perishable, right?

It's healthy fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy, protein, it's things that are really critical to a healthy diet and also very hard to afford.

- Hello.

Earlier you mentioned how inflation led to the rise of more people in need of the food bank services.

How did inflation impact the expenses of the distribution and how did the food bank really handle that inside the area, yeah.

- Oh, that's a great question, thank you.

Yeah, so inflation has certainly made things harder, right?

I mean the cost of diesel fuel last year went like through the roof.

I mean I'm looking at Dwayne, our VP of operations.

I think we budgeted something like 250 a gallon and we were paying 490 at one point or yeah, no, yeah.

(Kristin laughing) close enough.

We've got a fleet of 20 trucks and they're all running on diesel, right?

So that was last year and that was one of the first things we saw.

But then sure enough we started to slowly but surely see food prices go up.

And one of the most recent examples of food prices is the cost of turkeys.

So we distributed I think six semi-loads of turkeys this year.

We order turkeys in April to make sure that we can get them in time for the holidays and to try to lock in the lowest prices possible.

The cost of turkey was up something like 29 cents a pound.

Now on six semi-loads of turkey.

I mean the cost increase was unbelievable.

We spent a lot more and sadly that was fewer turkeys than there were able to afford to distribute the previous year.

So we continue to get the word out and to tell our community what we need and how they can help and how they can make food available.

And we're really grateful that our community continues to step up as we kind of deal with inflation and deal with rising costs.

Thanks for that question.

- Hi, Kristin.

Thank you and your team for the great work that you're doing.

I've been doing some research with food pantry managers and food pantry clients.

And one population that keeps coming up are grand families.

So grandparents who are caregivers with children.

And I mean a recent report shows that one in four grand families were food insecure in America in 2021.

I wanna ask with the food bank, is this a population that are on your radar?

Are you doing anything special for this group of population?

- Oh, that's a great question.

Thank you and thanks for your research.

It's nice to see you.

So we have been worried about seniors frankly for a number of years now.

And trying to expand our programming to serve more seniors and their grandkids in the case that they are raising grandkids.

And you are so right.

We've developed some senior programming.

So we work with some partners, pardon me, some partners to do senior markets, kind of similar to what I told you about that Alfreda visited.

So we'll look for a senior community center, a senior citizen center or another agency that serves a lot of seniors and we'll go out there on a regular basis with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables in produce, right?

Trying to make sure that seniors have access to that.

I haven't talked very much about our onsite production kitchen at the food bank.

But one of the things that we do that is somewhat unique in food banking is we have a production kitchen that makes about 7,000 meals a day.

So it's actually one of the largest kitchens in the City of Cleveland, believe it or not.

And we started this kitchen years ago following a merger.

And we began making meals for afterschool programs and summer programs for low income kids.

But a couple of strategic plans ago, we took a good hard look at the growing number of seniors in our community and across the nation.

Folks who work with seniors for a living know that this is being called the silver tsunami.

And our concern is, there are some wonderful Meals on Wheels partners out there, but in many cases they're already waiting lists.

And the number of seniors is only growing.

And so we have been, as part of our expansion plan, well first I should say we started working with more senior partners to provide meals in our kitchen for local Meals on Wheels programs.

But beyond that, in our new expansion project and at our new partner distribution hub, we have significantly increased the size of our kitchen so that we could distribute or we could produce, I should say, and distribute up to 20,000 meals a day.

And I hope we don't need to, I always say that, but if we simply look at the data and the number of seniors in our community and across the state and nation, there're gonna be a lot of people who are living longer, trying very hard to age at home and who will be likely to be in need of emergency food at some point.

- We have our next questions from our virtual audience via text.

What is the best and more sought after item by families at the food bank?

Like the unicorn donation that you wish more people thought to donate.

- The unicorn donation, I love it.

So we used to do this... Well for years we did an agency survey, we'll do another one soon, but an agency survey and client survey also.

And one of the questions every year, and this was for clients, is what is the one food item you'd like to see more of?

And for like forever the answer was meat, right?

I mean, meat's expensive.

It is harder to get donated, although not impossible.

We have a rescue route where we pick up at local retailers every week and that's one of the wonderful things we can bring back.

But the answer was meat.

I mean it's a center of your plate item, it's protein and it's expensive.

And as we've worked to distribute more fresh fruits and vegetables over the years, one of the things that I've been thrilled to see happen is the last time we did this survey of clients and we said, "What would you like to see more of?"

They said fresh fruits and vegetables.

And so that was a major shift.

And so I don't know that there's actually one thing, right?

A lot of people have food preferences for sure.

But we're working pretty hard to provide as many fresh fruits and vegetables as we can for all the reasons I've mentioned earlier.

And we have a wonderful program with the State of Ohio where we are able to buy surplus produce from Ohio farmers.

And through that program we're making millions of pounds of fresh produce possible every year as well as other programs.

- [Man] That's it.

(audience applauding) - Thank you Kristin Warzocha for joining us at the City Club of Cleveland today.

Today's forum was part of our local hero series in partnership with Citizens Bank and Dominion Energy.

Today's forum also was the annual forum on leadership for the greater good.

Which was made possible by a generous gift to the City Club endowment from an anonymous private family foundation.

The family champions free speech and is committed to lifting up and spotlighting those who tirelessly, selflessly and resolutely work to improve our community, our region and our nation.

We would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Center For Community Solutions, citizens, Greater Cleveland Food Bank, Huntington, Legal Aid Society Of Cleveland May Dugan Center, Metro Health Foundation, food bank chair Roddy Klein, Shaker Heights High School, UnifyWork and University Settlement.

Thank you all so much for being with us today.

Be sure to join us next week at the City Club on Friday, January 13th, where we will welcome author and New York Times journalist, Emily Flitter, who will discuss the racial wealth gap, civil rights and what it means to bank while Black.

Danielle Snyder, president of the Cleveland branch of the NAACP will moderate that conversation.

Then on Friday, January 20th, author Steve Phillips will discuss his latest book, "How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good."

Tickets are still available for each of those forums, and you can find out more on our website, cityclub.org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Kristin Warzocha and thank you to members, guests and friends of the City Club.

This forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauding) (bell rings) - [Narrator] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(suspense music) - [Announcer] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.