(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Good evening and welcome to "At Issue with Mark Welp".

Tonight we're talking about food insecurity and how many in central Illinois are desperate to get food.

We have two experts here who are fighting that issue, but first, our Phil Luciano introduces us to one man who relies on a food pantry, not only to get food for himself, but his pet.

- [Phil] When Adrian Porch needs to stretch his budget, he knows just where to go.

Like hundreds of others every month, Porch visits Sophia's Kitchen run by the Catholic Diocese.

It's one of multiple sites in Peoria that addresses food insecurity.

- Seems like here in America the value of the dollars decrease.

And so times kind of seem like it's more rough and things are getting more expensive.

- [Phil] Sophia's Kitchen runs multiple food programs.

Daily, volunteers hand out over 500 lunches, mostly peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Further, each Friday they open up a food pantry.

Visitors can take what they need back home.

Porch appreciates the way Sophia's Kitchen always treats guests with dignity.

- It's just has a good atmosphere, very clean, friendly environment.

The staff here are very friendly and very efficient and nice.

- [Phil] Sophia's Kitchen also offers a weekly pet pantry.

Porch comes for Diamond, his American Staffordshire.

- So they give out food here on Thursdays, either if you have a cat or dogs or either both.

And they either give you out some treats that they have available, dog food or cat food.

- [Phil] The reason people low on dough often will opt to feed their pets before feeding themselves, but if they have pet food from the pantry, they're more likely to take better care of themselves.

For Porch, the less he has to spend on his dog, the better he can take care of other expenses.

- So this kind of works to a advantage of, you know, not having to spend more money on dog food when you got other things necessary that's going on as far as keep up.

- Thank you, Phil.

Tonight we wanna talk to two people who are at the front lines of food insecurity.

First, we introduced you to Rebecca Crumrine.

She is with the U of I extension.

And secondly, Claire Crone, who's the program director for Sophia's Kitchen in Peoria.

Thanks for coming on.

We appreciate it.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thank you.

- Let's talk to you first, Claire, about what Sophia's Kitchen does and the need that we're seeing here in Peoria.

- Sure.

- So how have you seen this, let's start, I guess, from the pandemic.

How have you seen the need grow?

- Oh, when the pandemic hit, it was very difficult for people to get food.

So we were feeding, we were putting food out just individually at the window.

As things got better, we were able to make our pantry that had been a monthly pantry before that into a weekly pantry.

So getting food is difficult for us.

Every week we need to put together boxes for people, about 115 people, and getting enough groceries for that many people is always difficult.

- Typically, where do you get your groceries and your donations?

- From individual donors.

So we will go to the grocery store and purchase some food, but most of our food comes in from individual donors.

- And as far as the people who need that food, I don't know if you get a chance to talk to them often, but what kind of a need are you seeing?

There are these people who are unemployed, are these people who are employed, but still can't make ends meet?

What's going on?

- Most of the people that come to the pantry are employed.

They just can't make ends meet.

They've got doctor bills to meet.

Rent has gone up.

Grocery bills is the number one reason that they're telling us that they can't afford the groceries anymore.

Their budget just only goes so far.

They only have so much money in their budget.

They can't afford to get any more groceries.

So what we are is a supplemental to them.

We're able to give them enough food that they can add other things to it to make ends meet.

But it's a lot more people than we had ever seen before.

Before the pandemic, we would see maybe 50 people at our pantry.

And now it is almost always a hundred, 115, 120 people.

- And how many of those are families with kids?

- Most of them.

- Okay.

Rebecca, you're with the U of I extension.

Tell me what the U of I extension is doing to help out with this growing problem.

Yeah, so it's kind of an interesting position that I get to be in because through my position with SNAP Education, I don't do anything with helping with like link benefits or any of that.

That's all through DHS.

But it's actually a federal grant where we get to help families in making healthier choices, easier choices.

And as a part of that, we really want to stress food access, because if we wanna help make a healthy choice, an easy choice, if there's no healthy foods in their neighborhood, how can they make those choices?

So I work with people like Claire.

I work with our food banks, I work with schools, anywhere that our families might eat, live, sleep, learn, play, to try to make changes to those policies, and systems and environments to really support them to make those healthy choices.

And also just to have access to that food.

- Yeah, speaking of healthy choices, we talk about, especially here in Peoria, food deserts.

It's hard to eat healthy when a gas station is your only supermarket in the area.

- Right.

- So when people come to you are they, especially I guess, for their kids, are they saying, "Hey, we need fruits, "vegetables, healthy options?"

- Absolutely, and the children are the ones that are oftentimes driving those healthy options.

They're asking for the fruits and vegetables.

They would prefer to get that than some of the other unhealthy choices, which is interesting.

But 80% of our guests don't have a car.

They don't have access to a car.

So they're walking, they're sharing rides, they're riding the bus.

So it's difficult for them to get to any kind of a grocery store.

Having us in the area is just very, very easy for them.

- And how do you grow in this era that we're in with, you know, if you rely mostly on donations, how do you get the word out there that you say, "Hey, we need donations.

"If you can in the public spare anything."

- Facebook.

- Facebook, okay.

- It's really great.

We put the need out and we get very many donations to come in from that.

Our donors are very generous.

We find that the people of Peoria are very heartfelt and they're always trying to do the best that they possibly can.

So that's a beautiful thing for us.

- Yeah, and I think it's important.

People may not know that food insecurity exists in their own backyard, right Here in Peoria, of course.

And then little, I live in Eureka, right?

It doesn't have to be in the middle of a city, right?

There's a lot of food insecurity in our rural neighborhoods.

It's everywhere.

So just being cognizant, okay, what are resources that are available in my community?

And maybe you don't know, and that's okay.

There's, we have a map called Find Food Illinois, that can help you find maybe some local pantries that could be used by people to find a pantry or by someone who's looking to donate and maybe doesn't know where to start.

You could find something local too.

So I think being connected, yes, like Claire said, to your local community, having a pulse on that and where you can donate is important.

- Absolutely.

- When you're looking at food insecurity, whether it's in Peoria, in an urban environment, or Tazewell County, Eureka, that's a more rural environment, do you have a different way of fighting insecurity?

Or is it all the same no matter what the location is?

- I think that's a good question.

Each area has its own individual problems, right?

- Right.

- So in an urban area, while we may have, as you mentioned, a food desert, right?

We don't have necessarily a fresh grocery store, but some people might even call it a food swamp in certain places because there are other not great food options.

- Yes.

- Fast food, other things that are just far too readily available with no other healthy options.

So you might be looking at things like transportation and how does the CityLink bus work in those areas.

And how many bus stops does it take to get to a grocery store?

Meanwhile, in our rural areas, we don't necessarily have some of those resources readily, like readily available.

So a lot of times they talk about it a little differently where it's, you have to be 10 or so miles from a grocery store to be considered too far from a grocery store or instead of like a half a mile in a city.

So there's some different ways we think about it and might need to address it.

Do you have anything else, Claire?

- The food banks are awesome to help us out.

- Oh yeah.

- Yeah.

Midwest Food Bank, Peoria Food Bank, they're just great at helping us get food.

Peoria Food Bank especially will have a lot of fruits and vegetables for us.

So that is a big benefit.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So how do we alleviate this problem other than maybe a big company coming in and building a grocery store?

You know, not everybody can even afford to shop, unfortunately.

What can our elected officials do?

What can we do as a community to work on this issue?

- So food insecurity is called a wicked problem.

So if you know what a wicked problem is, that basically means, you know, we don't have a one step solution, right?

But it does mean that we have to be creative, I feel like in our solutions, and also be collaborative in how we are working on this.

So as through my job, I get to be a part of our Heal Food System partners and Heal team locally.

And we work a lot together with lots of different partners coming together to try to make change.

When we're too siloed, we might not be able to really create the greater impact.

So I think that's a big part of it, is really coming together to create those changes.

But I think it's also just important for, as you mentioned, elected officials and even our general community to begin to understand that there is that food insecurity and that it exists.

I think sometimes we like to think of hunger as an issue that America doesn't have, and that's not true.

We know that a lot of Americans are either one medical bill away, or one little bill away from being food insecure and being unable to purchase that food for their family.

- One of the things that one of my bosses pointed out to me one time when he first came, is he looked around and he said, "There's such malnutrition in this area."

And that was a telling statement, because we used to think about starvation as very, very thin people like you'd see in the starving nations.

But in our area, we see very, very fat people.

People who are relying on not good quality food.

They're getting the heavy carbs and not a lot of other things.

So that is a big issue for a lot of people.

But I think that one of the best ways to battle all of this is kindness.

To remember that a lot of our people who are coming to us, they're on their way back up.

They've hit the bottom, but they're on their way back up.

They're trying to get themselves out of this situation, and most of them succeed.

There will be always a few who hunger, poverty will never end for them.

And those are the ones that really break your heart.

And you know, our elderly people, our handicapped people, through no fault of their own, they're not gonna be able to get out of poverty.

So those are the people that we truly want to make sure that we're helping to get the healthiest foods.

- And defense of some of those people, if you're hungry, you're hungry.

You're not gonna say, "Oh, they've only got junk food, "I'm not gonna eat."

- Right.

- Of course you're gonna eat the junk food, you eat something, - Yes.

- Tell us a little bit, Rebecca, about the Heal Program you mentioned it earlier.

- Yeah.

- What exactly is that?

- Sure, so Heal stands for Healthy Eating, Active Living.

So basically in our Tri-County area, we have the partnership for a healthy community.

And they do a community health needs assessment every few years.

And for the past, I don't know how many years, seven, at least years, Heal has been a priority.

So basically that means when they've done these surveys in our communities, we've seen that a lot of our community is not eating enough fruits and vegetables.

They're not being active in a way that really helps them to live a healthy life.

So we come in in a place trying to help families to make those choices or make it easier to make those choices.

So we work on different initiatives like nutrition education.

We also have a physical activity team that's working on some different supports for physical activity in our community.

We have a team that just works on food access and does different things like our Grow a Row program.

And then we have a team that really focuses on food safety and making sure that we're connecting our charitable food space and organizations like Sophia's Kitchen to good information about food safety for handing out food to their guests.

And then we have a team that really works in like the food advocacy and policy side to try to advance things.

So as you can see, it's so multifaceted, right?

Because we're trying to create a space where change can really happen.

- Claire, do you find that people who are out there who are suffering from food insecurity, do they know of these different programs and food pantries that are available?

- We work really hard to let them know that we're not the only place that they can access us on every Friday from one to three PM, but there are pantries available seven days a week in Peoria.

So we do have that posted for them so that they're aware of that.

I think some of these other programs they might not directly understand them, but we use them.

So they're out there.

- If someone's watching this and wants to help, Claire, what, what kind of food do you want donated?

I'm sure you're not picky, but what would you prefer?

- We prefer healthy options.

So we're always asking for low sodium, low sugar, natural juices in your fruits.

We're also asking no glass, glass is a miserable thing in a soup kitchen.

If a bottle gets dropped, it means that everything stops for a while while we clean everything up.

But anything that's whole grain, your good healthier choices like that are great.

Protein is really a big, big demand item.

Any kind of a meat, tuna fish, canned chicken, those are very, very popular.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, - The pop tops are nice too.

- Oh yeah, because if you're homeless, you don't have a can opener with you to open the can.

- Yeah.

- That's, I mean, that's something most people probably don't think about.

- Right, yeah.

- Rebecca, if people, especially in a rural area wanna help out, have you or your organization reached out to say farmers who might have excess crops that they're willing to donate, things like that?

- Yeah, yeah.

So I mentioned very briefly that Grow a Row Program, and that's run through Tasso County Health Department, who plays a major lead role in that Heal collaboration I talked about.

But through that program, we encourage any home growers, community gardens, anybody who wants to get involved, you can grow an extra row or however much you want to grow.

Or if you just have extra zucchini and you weren't planning on having the extra zucchini.

- Sure.

- 'cause that seems to always happen.

(all laughing) You can donate that.

So the idea is we have a list of participating agencies that will accept that food and when they will accept it.

And then a person who's involved with Grow a Row can look at that and say, "Oh, I can go take my zucchini to Sophia's Kitchen on this day at this time.

Or I know the Riverside Community Fridge.

Or you know, different places that are open at different times to try to give people that ability to really just donate directly to a pantry or someplace that could give it out to our families in need.

- Do you have a website or anywhere where people get more information on these programs?

- We do, yes.

I would probably start at the Partnership for Healthy Community website, which is healthyhoi.org.

And then we have a list of a lot of these different programs and activities that are going on.

So, yeah.

- I guess one of my final questions is how do we not only improve these programs for people, but stop it from getting worse?

Any ideas on that?

- So I think something that we're seeing recently is there is this great uptick in need, right?

So I think there's a lot of fear in some of our pantries and our managers, like what if we don't have enough food to feed people?

So I think there's an immediacy right now where it's can we have more support and you know, really increasing those donations.

- [Claire] Right.

- And then that sustainable piece would be hopefully if people can jump on board, don't leave us.

We will need that support still ongoing, as Claire has mentioned, you know?

- Sure.

- But hopefully we can get to a point where there's a little less need because we know that there's a lot of great people donating as Claire mentioned, and there's a lot of great activity happening, but we just kind of need that extra support right now as we try to fight what's going on in our community.

- Everybody likes to donate at Christmas time, but summertime is actually the time that we have the biggest need.

So we come to July and our donations are, everybody's on vacation, and we're really desperate about that time.

- And as far as helping these people out, excuse me, more permanently, besides giving them food to get them by a day or two, you did mention that most of them already are employed.

How can we, is there a way that people can maybe help people get better jobs or, you know what I mean, to try and alleviate this need for the food pantries and things like that?

- We work with a lot of employment agencies.

Goodwill is a fantastic place and we do post jobs for them constantly.

So we're trying to always clue people in to places that they can go to get better employment.

- And you mentioned that a lot of people don't have transportation.

How far away have you seen people come to Sophia's Kitchen for food?

- We are a very low barrier kitchen.

So that means we don't take any information from people, so we're not requiring a zip code access in order to get food.

So they're able to come from all over the Tri-County area and we see people come from as far as Pekin to get groceries.

- Well, that says a lot.

- It does.

- For those people in Tazewell County, we'll go back to kind of a rural setting.

Do you find transportation is a big issue there too?

- Yeah, it is always an issue for our families for sure.

Even if they have that car, if they live in that rural setting and have a car, when the car breaks down or something happens, it's just that much further to be able to get to that food.

- Gas.

- Yeah.

And gas is obviously expensive too.

- Yeah.

- So we do also operate some one time crisis emergent deliveries to try to help families that are in those situations.

But we know that that's an ongoing need at times.

You know, it doesn't mean that we've fixed the car right after we get them some food.

- Right.

- So yes, it is still an issue.

I think that with our pantries, we're trying to figure out ways that we can better serve our guests and we kind of do that collaboratively too.

We come together and get to share some best practices and talk about what's going on.

Maybe try to support each other.

Not probably right now, but maybe Claire sometimes has extra of something and she can say, "Hey, does someone need this?"

So just trying to better serve people because a lot of times food is in the community, but we just need to get it to the people.

- Sure.

- So that is the hardest part I would say throughout this whole problem that we have.

- And Claire, just for an example, when someone comes to you for food, typically, how much would you give them?

How long does that last them?

- So we do a soup pantry.

Soup kitchen every day.

They're able to come in and get a sack lunch for the day.

So that's enough food for one person for one day.

On Friday we'd have our food pantry.

The way that we sat up is they're able to come in, we give them a bag, they walk around the tables, they pick the food that they prefer, which is a big help.

That alleviates a lot of waste that way.

Our shoppers help them out and we say that it's one bag, but actually when they leave, it's a couple of bags of groceries.

'Cause we add on things and sometimes there's bigger items and you know, by the time they leave, you know, it's always a miracle.

It's kind of like the loaves and fishes.

When they walk out, they've got a lot of groceries and we're hopeful that that will last them at least a week until the next Friday pantry.

- Okay.

Phil introduced us, Phil Luciano introduced us to a gentleman earlier who not only has to get food for himself, but for his pets, something people may not think about.

Do you find that common?

- Absolutely, we were having some issues with people feeding that lunch that we give them on a daily basis.

They were feeding it to their animal instead, because they didn't want their pet to go hungry.

And their pets mean so much for them.

For some of our people, they've been so wounded by humans that they have no trust of people, but that animal is their only support.

So we wanna be able to keep them bonded together, make sure that nobody goes hungry.

So with that, we started just kind of on the sly, getting a little dog food here and a little dog food there.

And then we kind of made it more formal and every Thursday we're able to give out cat and dog food as long as we have some.

We don't always have any or much.

Kitty litter is always something that we're desperate for.

But yeah, it definitely helps to keep those bonds to together for people.

- Absolutely, one of those things people take for granted, I think.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Well if people wanna find out more about Sophia's Kitchen, where can they go?

- They can either visit us on Facebook at Sophia's Angels Kitchen, or they can go to our website, catholicpeoria.com.

- Alright, very good ladies, thanks very much for all you're doing for the community, and we hope that people out there in the Peoria area, Tri-County area keep being generous and help you help other folks.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Back here with Phil Luciano.

And Phil, that gentleman that you talked to earlier in the show, you know, it really puts a human face on things, tugs at your heartstrings.

But then when he says, "I gotta feed my dog too.

", that's like, oof.

- Yeah, and you know, I know there's some people who say, "Well, why do you even have to bother with an animal "if you don't have your own food?"

Well, the point, and as our guests were talking about, the point is that for a lot of people, that's their only family.

They don't have anybody else and they have a dog or a cat.

It's a big deal.

And one of the things that I've learned from working with folks at food pantries, a lot of times they will feed their animal, because they believe like, "Well, if I'm eating, the dog will see me eating."

The dog does not understand sacrifice or even if they trade it off one time after another, you eat, I eat, they don't understand any of this.

I mean, I'm telling you something very basic, but in that world where that's your only family, what do you tell the dog?

I'm sorry, you can't eat today.

So they feed the dog, they feed the cat, and they don't eat themselves.

And that's a mess.

So it's a great thing that there are pantries that do help out with pet food, it's great.

- And we talked about covid and how they say the need has grown since Covid.

That kind of surprised you.

- Yeah, it did.

Because, for most people, you know what, 99% of the time, COVID went away or it's almost gone, whatever, yay.

But for a lot of folks who were dependent on, who have been dependent on food pantries and other food insecurity measures, the disappearance of Covid has meant a lot of that relief help has gone away.

Programs have gone away.

Governmental help has gone away.

And so it's like, well, hunger doesn't go away.

You know, it's still there.

And one basic fact that we know that if you're trying to change someone or someone's trying to change employment wise, behavior wise or even spiritually or any way they wanna change, it's hard to change if they're still hungry.

There's nothing in the belly.

So this is ground level stuff and it's such a great need now.

- Sure is.

Well, let's transition over to our next program, which is coming up in just a few minutes.

"You Gotta See This".

- And we have our special Thanksgiving episode, and next week will be Thanksgiving, of course.

So we're, we're one week ahead and we got a couple great stories.

We have a visit to a Peoria social service agency and what happened there is what often happens is a great thing.

A person who was helped by this agency now is helping this agency to help others.

And that person's very thankful to be involved in that way.

That's a really good story.

And we're also gonna take you to Thanksgiving in Peoria means the next day.

That's your Santa Claus parade downtown.

- Oh yeah.

- The longest running Santa Claus parade in the nation.

And we're gonna show you some of those floats that have been there almost since the beginning.

We're talking 130 years.

How do they keep 'em going?

We'll take you, show you.

- All right.

Sounds like a great show.

And we appreciate you watching us.

You can see us here every Thursday night at 8:00 PM followed by "You Gotta See This".

Check us out at wtvp.org and WTVP Facebook.

Have a great night.

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