San Francisco-Marin Food Bank’s Pop-up Relief
San Francisco-Marin Food Bank’s Pop-up Pantry at Oracle Stadium. Photo: Courtesy of SF-Marin Food Bank
April 8, 2021
The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank has long provided food assistance to the many who struggle to make ends meet. But with an unprecedented increase in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bay Area non-profit organization has had to adapt quickly and strategically to distribute a whole new level of aid. “There were a lot of people who had never come to us before,” says Communications and Social Media Manager Keely Hopkins.“The biggest thing for us,” she says, “was just seeing a lot of very new faces turning to us for support.”
According to the Food Bank, one in eight adults and one in five children struggle with food insecurity in California, despite the fact that the state produces nearly half of America's fruits and vegetables. Even before the pandemic, one in five San Francisco and Marin County residents was at risk of hunger, and many of them have relied on their local food pantries for staples, fresh produce, and meat supplied by the non-profit.
Since March of 2019, the need has almost doubled. Within a matter of weeks, the organization went from supplying groceries to 32,000 households a week to a staggering 62,000. And with the closure of about 100 local pantries in their network (many were located in churches, schools, and community centers) the Food Bank has adapted to distributing food directly through their own pop-up pantries and home delivery service.
In order to meet the huge demand, the pop-ups have instituted time slots for pick-up and drive-throughs at some of the larger sites. This new model has “allowed us to scale and grow them around the city,” says Hopkins, waving her hands vigorously to emphasize exponential growth. “They’re really dynamic because each could serve a thousand households.”
The organization has also beefed up its CalFresh outreach (California’s version of SNAP), helping pantry participants with education and registration. “We received a lot of first-time calls regarding CalFresh support,” she says, “from folks who never thought they’d have a need.”
Here is Hopkins’ story on serving faces new and old, and how the Food Bank has adapted to unexpected changes in the past year.
As told to Naoki Nitta, April 5, 2021
I arrived at the Food Bank just over a year ago. Yeah, it was a wild time to start a new job. In just two months, we went from feeding 32,000 families a week to 62,000, at 27 emergency pop-up pantries in San Francisco and Marin County. We’ve now leveled off at about 55,000.
Before the pandemic, we had a very decentralized model. We worked with a lot of neighborhood partners—organizations, churches, community centers, other nonprofits who run food pantries as part of their programming—and we distributed to them directly. We had a network of 275 pantries; with the shut-down, about a third of them had to close almost immediately.
Some of them were at schools and government-run. Those are gone, we lost those sites. Others were at senior centers or maybe churches that didn't have a parking lot, so they couldn't have people inside. A lot of the issues were around safety. People used to come to our pantries and got to “shop” farmer's market style. But going around and picking out what you wanted was completely not conducive to social distancing, sanitation and all that.
We also lost a whole cohort of volunteers, retirees who didn't feel safe coming out. That's why we started the pop-up pantries where we could distribute food en mass to people who had lost access to their regular ones. And the plan was really to open a few for a number of weeks, until those old pantries could open back up.
We quickly started seeing tons of people coming out to these pop-ups. Before the pandemic, the neighborhood ones were very small. Everyone knew each other, which was one of the beautiful things about our programming. But they might have served 80 people, maybe 250 at a large one. So with this new demand, the pop-ups have allowed us to scale and grow them around the city. They’re really dynamic because each could serve a thousand households.
Once we scaled up, one of the things we had to do was move people through lines quickly, because you're serving a lot more in one setting. Because of that, we shifted to having volunteers pack up groceries in advance and distributing them at the pantries.
On our distribution
We direct anybody with internet access to our website, to our Food Locator. It’s a tool that you plug in a little bit of demographic information about yourself—where you live, how old you are—and it will help you find a pantry.
We also tell you other suitable programming that we offer in your area. That gets updated almost daily. We saw a significant increase in traffic to that page—I think it went up four times, like almost immediately. There's also a call-in line for people who don't have internet access.
I don't know if you’ve volunteered for a public pantry, but very early on in the pandemic, there were these images of people waiting forever, in these really long lines around the block. So we asked people to register, to sign up for specific time slots. That’s really helped to reduce the lines. Now no one's waits more than 10 minutes—they’re in and out, which is great because you don't want to be standing in line for hours.
We ask for ID just so we know who you are, and we try to get some demographic info about where you’re coming from. But we can waive that if you don't have ID or an address, and you don't have to prove income or need or anything like that.
Overall, we never ran out of food. There were definitely times when more than the expected number of people showed up to a specific site, and we had to give out tickets and refer them elsewhere. But the registrations allow us to gauge how much food each pantry needs so we can send the appropriate amount of food to each. Now we know, like, 500 people are signed up for this site, so we’re going to send 600 portions in case a few extra come.
We’ve also expanded our delivery program to homebound, disabled seniors below a certain income threshold. We’re at about 8,000 right now, but it was basically non-existent pre-pandemic. We had a small home delivery program for qualified participants, and we, along with some of our partner pantries, were distributing a few hundred out of our warehouse. When the pandemic hit, we made a pretty immediate decision to put them—anybody over the age of 65 who was already receiving groceries—automatically onto a program that we call “Pantry at Home.”
It was intended to be temporary, like we’ll just deliver to all those people who had to stay at home. Within a matter of weeks, with the help of volunteers and a couple of corporate partners, we scaled that from this small, you-had-to-qualify-for program, to serving about 12,000 seniors a week. Since then, a lot of people have opted to come off of it, so now we’re down to about 8,000. They prefer to go to their pantry.
It’s been successful though, and we’re exploring what it will look like in the future. I think we've learned a lot and there's hope that we can keep it going, to expand it beyond seniors, but it really hasn’t been decided yet. One of the demographics we're looking at is people with small children, or children with disabilities, who may have trouble getting themselves to a pantry.
On our participants
Initially, there were a lot of people who had never come to us before. They’d never accessed services like that and didn't know how to navigate a system. That kind of continued; you saw people who had savings, or had cobbled together a few jobs here and there, and then that ran out. We live in a very expensive area where people are trying to hang on with rent and all kinds of other things. So the biggest thing for us was just seeing a lot of very new faces turning to us for support.
I met this man, Thomas, last week at the Rosa Parks Elementary School pop-up. He used to work in the restaurant industry but now, he’s only able to get some shifts here and there.
He was there with his daughter, who’s nine years old. Zoom school had been challenging for her, so he and his wife sat down and had a really hard conversation, that somebody needed to be home with her. His wife has a more stable job and earns more, so they made the really hard choice for him to stay home, that his inconsistent shifts weren't worth it for their family, for their daughter to fall behind in school.
They also have a teenage daughter. With two kids and only one income in San Francisco, it's nearly impossible. Since they make a little bit too much to qualify for CalFresh, the support from the Food Bank, just to get staples, he says, has been amazingly helpful.
And while he's hopeful that things will be back to full steam once his daughter is physically attending school again, it could be another year for them before they recover, before they’re fully back on their feet financially.
I hear a lot of stories like that, especially the ones with kids, and they really touch me because everyone's struggling to balance, to make ends meet. We hear these stories, particularly of professional women having to make those same, really tough choices to leave the workforce because they can't afford childcare. As a professional woman myself, I care about this issue deeply.
On our support
The community has been very generous, both in terms of donations and volunteers. I think people really viewed the Food Bank as an essential service.
We used to get most of our volunteers from corporate groups, large companies like Salesforce and Google. They would have a monthly onboarding for employees to do a volunteer shift together, and it was a lot of them—they might send a group of 50. But they stopped those shifts as soon as they started working from home, and we lost almost all of our volunteers immediately, in the first couple of weeks.
Between some really good press, though, and a lot of social media, the community really rallied. We saw a lot of people working from home who were like, “I have a flexible schedule. I’m going to take my lunch break and come volunteer.” And there were kids—teenagers and college students—who suddenly had a ton of time on their hands. It did take a little while, but we totally saw a rebound. Now we’re seeing twice as many volunteers every week as we had before.
Many of our corporate partners have made extra monetary donations or upped their annual giving, so we've definitely seen a lot of generosity there. We also got a lot of new partners who had never worked with us before. Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company, reached out to us very early on and said, “We have this fleet of cars. Can we be helpful?” And we were like, “Yes, we have this delivery program that we're trying to scale up!” They got a permit from the City right away to run their cars, and have been making a lot of deliveries for us. They're a wonderful partner, and it’s a win-win: they get to test their vehicles and we get deliveries.
UberEats was making deliveries for us for a little while. Amazon has helped too, and I think Door Dash did a few. OnFleet, a company that makes software for routing deliveries offered their software for free. We used this for our volunteers, who make about half of all deliveries.
On our costs
There are areas where our costs have definitely gone up. We always purchase our food; that’s part of our model. One of the big things for us was grain. We used to buy rice in mass bulk, like a literal ton of rice. Volunteers would then sort that into family-size bags in our clean rooms at our Marin and San Francisco warehouses. But those rooms weren't conducive to social distancing; we didn't physically have the space for them to do that safely. So we immediately had to start buying bagged, family size portions.
We called our distributors and asked, “Can you take this grain back and pack it for us?” That was challenging because it was more expensive, and we were competing with grocery stores. We never ran into a situation where we ran out, but there were times where we were asking ourselves, “Is this delivery going to get here on time?” We’ve had to order way in advance and make some projections, because something that might've taken two weeks to arrive is now taking four—the distributors just don't know.
We’d had disaster service workers from the City for quite some time, and when we lost them, we also lost their bilingual language support. We struggle with that from a volunteer perspective, especially since we’ve had to hire extra staff onsite.
We've almost doubled our staff in the last year. We've also had to purchase more trucks, and rent extra warehouse space because we were bursting at the seams. So there are many ways in which our operating costs have gone up to support infrastructure.
As we look forward, as things open back up and people get out of this crisis mindset, I hope support will continue, because we know that the need will. We’re not seeing a dip in web traffic to our “Find Food” page, nor in the people coming to our pantries. Folks who have lost work because of the pandemic, all who’ve never needed us before are saying, “I'm still not back at work.” Or, “I was working two jobs before, and now I have one part-time shift. I can barely make full-time hours.”
It's going to take some time for people who have been severely, negatively impacted to get back on their feet. We're planning for what the long haul looks like, and closely monitoring how much community support will continue. So far it's been good. But I think as the vaccine rolls out, as people go back to work and school and all those things, it will be really important to shift messaging to make sure people remember that the need is still there.
On CalFresh (California’s version of SNAP)
We get a lot of our food through government commodities and a whole host of USDA programs. Last year they started a program called “Farm to Families,” meant to mitigate some of the loss in demand that farmers were facing by match them with food banks. So we were able to get quite a bit of food through that. But in the beginning, it was like a wrecking ball through the supply chain.
We have an advocacy arm, and the biggest focus is around CalFresh. We do direct support with registration, and also help a lot of community support partners with education and outreach. One of our big pushes last year was the 15% bump (allotment increase), which I think landed in this latest round of recovery. We've also worked really hard to push for reduction in some of the administrative barriers that prevent people from getting their benefits.
We received a lot of first-time calls regarding CalFresh support, from folks who never thought they’d have a need. I want to say call volume has at least doubled, but I think it was more. (n.b. She never got back to me with exact number)
On the future
Right now, we're planning to sustain these levels for the foreseeable future. For the people that have been hit hardest by this pandemic, people who've been in debt and all of that, it’s going to take more than a shot in the arm to get them back to work and recovering financially.
It’s also definitely taken a toll on our staff. They really care about what they do, and about the community. One of the things our leadership team is looking at is how to support staff with burnout, pandemic fatigue, and all of that. These folks are tired. We had really anticipated this to last months, months, and it’s now been more than a long year.