SEMO Food Bank, local food pantries serving more in wake of coronavirus

The Southeast Missouri Food Bank in Sikeston, Missouri, along with the several food pantries in the region, have experienced an increase in the number of people they serve during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lisa Church, chief advancement officer of the SEMO Food Bank, said before the pandemic began the organization was helping serve roughly 60,000 people per month. During the beginning of the pandemic, Church said the number of people needing food assistance doubled, and in some communities even tripled. Since then, the numbers have stabilized, but there are still more people being served than before

“We estimate now that we’re serving about 40%, more people,” Church said. “It’s still more people, but it has stabilized from what we saw in, like, March, April and May. In the latter part of the summer, beginning probably around late July, August, it began to stabilize.”

Prior to the COVID outbreak, Red Star Food Pantry in Cape Girardeau would have one major food distribution event per month, along with occasional emergencies, according to pantry officials. Since then, Red Star has received so many requests and food donations it has increased distribution to twice a week.

Aside from the standard Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations of hand-washing, mask wearing and staying home if a person is experiencing symptoms, food pantries have begun using a contact-free drive-through method to serve those in need of food assistance.

A food pantry volunteer helps load food into cars during a drive-through distribution event.Submitted

“When we first started seeing the increase in food coming into us and we could do a little bit more distribution, we were seeing, for the most part, the same people that would come to our monthly distributions,” Red Star Food Pantry director Kevin Sexton said. “In recent months, after we started doing drive-throughs, we’ve seen an increase in a lot of people that we haven’t seen before. We’ve got a lot of individuals that are coming through and obviously telling us they lost their job, or they greatly reduced their number of hours. We’re seeing a lot of people that we have not seen in the past.”

Before implementing drive-through distributions, people would have to wait in line at the distribution center, fill out paperwork for tracking purposes and have someone hand them a box of food, which was not a safe practice for reducing the spread of COVID. Now, those in need of assistance simply pull up in a vehicle and pantry workers will load a box.

“People would pull up in their car and pop the trunk, and you put a box of food in the trunk and they went on their way, or you stick it in the backseat,” Church said. “So, people stayed in their vehicles so that they were isolated from other people.”

In an effort to better assist seniors, people who may be quarantined because of the virus or people who have no method of transportation, Red Star has been allowing someone else to pick up food for them.

“The programs that we operate that require signatures, documentation and things like that, those restrictions have been greatly reduced,” Sexton said. “They don’t have to sign any longer. So what we have done is we’ve kind of relaxed that, so if they have somebody that can come pick it up for them, we can deal with a lot of our situations that way. Whereas in the past, they would have to come in, sit down with us, and actually fill out paperwork themselves and sign for the food.

“Since that’s no longer a requirement, we can serve people by having a friend come, or if they know somebody else who’s coming to get food that day, we can give them their food in somebody else’s. ... If somebody comes to us and says, ‘Hey, my neighbor needs food, can you help them?’ We try to help as much as we can. Now, some of the other programs that we have, they need to call and say hey somebody’s picking it up for me.”

The Southeast Missouri Food Bank provides food to pantries, soup kitchens and shelters in 16 counties in Southeast Missouri. The food bank also works with partners to hold mobile food distributions, provide monthly food boxes to seniors and provide weekend backpacks of food to students in the region.

Anyone interested in donating or supporting the food bank may visit www.semofoodbank.org; mail a donation or check to P.O. Box 190, Sikeston, MO 63801; or call (573) 471-1818.