Hunger and the Work Ahead in Portage County

Patrick Childers (: 00:06

I've been extremely moved by the folks running small food pantries all around Portage County to make sure that people are fed. I mean, they're doing this on top of full-time jobs, on top of raising their own families with their own monetary and financial issues themselves. And I've been extremely impressed by the people in power that we've talked to who have used their power to help. back.

we've made it to the final stop on our journey navigating through food insecurity relief in Portage County, Ohio. Hi, I'm Patrick, and this is my brother. Hi, I'm Ben. To recap, we first met with John Kennedy and Sabrina Christian Bennett, public servants who helped us understand the food insecurity issue from a county government perspective. Next, we saw what United Way Portage County and the Akron Ketten Food Bank are doing to relieve this problem, connecting the dots between the government's resources and the communities that need them.

In our last segment, we saw what's being done by folks running small food pantries. It was truly eye-opening, spending the day with Jason and Irina and meeting some of the folks they've helped with their mobile food pantry. I agree. And in this segment, we'll explore what support looks like on the individual level and hear again from many of the folks we've met along our journey who have some great ideas on how to get involved and how you can help. This is United Relief.

Patrick Childers (: 01:29

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Patrick Childers (: 01:40

So let's go back to where we started at John Kennedy's office in Ravenna, Ohio. Now, he initially gave us a view as the Portage County treasurer on our first encounter. come from sort of an advocacy, lobbying, activist background. It's in my core. So I will happily lobby our lawmakers to step up and fix Homestead, take care of a lot of the problems for our seniors, and that will help them in

every other aspect of their lives too and help with their property taxes. More money is available for an emergency and for food. John continues to stress the interconnectivity of it all, which he can see as a civil servant, but he also is getting involved on the individual level.

er run. Yeah. So, OK, back to: 2020

mile Leadville Trail in: 2010

and work with family and community services, all the money would go into their existing Change Hunger program. And so I would just educate and provide links on the website to Change Hunger for Portage County. And people would be able to make donations that way for the food pantries that are associated with Change Hunger. And so that first year that I did it, we raised $6,000.

Patrick Childers (: 03:56

which doesn't seem like a lot of money, but every dollar makes a difference. And now in year five, and I have to get more updated numbers because people still donate all year round. I think we're well over 15,000 that we've raised for it, which still sounds small, but I'm hoping that the more that it's publicized and I get more people to participate with me because I...

This issue is not going to go away. And maybe it takes a knucklehead like me to continue to do something like this, to raise the visibility of the issue and the problem and get people to focus on it a little bit, you know? Again, John Kennedy took it upon himself to raise awareness and money outside of his role as treasurer. That's right. And despite being type one diabetic, I mean,

Not only is he a civil servant raising a family, but he's pushing himself to help his community with every spare ounce of energy that he can muster. Now, we all can't run a hundred miles. Very true, very true. But what can we do as individuals? Well, John's not the only one who we've met who is stepping up to take matters into their own hands.

Patrick Childers (: 05:16

Just last week, I helped serve at Center of Hope for their Thanksgiving lunch. We went through all the food that was there. And it provides not only the food, but the sort of camaraderie, the friendships I think that maybe people don't get. This is Heather, Director of Development and Marketing at United Way Portage County, Ohio, who we met back in our first episode. And especially people who are

maybe marginalized or, you know, maybe have some issues with their health or their mental health. They're not, they're not out every day seeing people. So when they get food and get companionship and, you know, just have people treat them with some dignity and as friends, mean, with Joyce Harris, who's the director there, I mean, she greets everybody as though they're family, you know, she welcomes them, hey, you know, Bill, how are you doing? And, and it's just, it's really, that's the kind of thing that

You you can sit in the office here and say, we, you know, gave this much money to this program or we, you know, sent volunteers to this program. But when you're there and you see that kind of thing, that's, that's where the change is. That's where you're making a difference. think. Heather's giving her time outside of work to help out and she's seeing real impact. Now, Brooke at the Akron Ketten food bank.

also takes time out of her busy schedule to help out. job can be emotionally taxing sometimes, especially because I'll go and help in the Canton pantry a lot. just to see kind of the different neighbors that come in, it can be really hard. But it also on the flip side is so nice to know that we play a role in helping them out and getting the food to them. Look, nobody's saying it's an easy task. We all have jobs, responsibilities, but don't we also have a responsibility to our neighbors, to our neighborhoods?

Beyond the feeling of accomplishment, we can each help create change. And maybe if enough of us give some effort, we'll see larger results.

Patrick Childers (: 07:14

So we're back at United Way Portage County and Bill Childers and I are talking about the food pantry going on outside of the offices there run by the health district. So this is our first winter so that explains why some of them were you know wearing slacks with no thermals. So again the responsibility of getting this food into these people's hands is people that are not being paid to necessarily do this exactly.

There's additional duties. There's additional duties. This is a gig for once a month. One day they know they're going to have to be traffic control. It's kind of like being at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, where you got hundreds of people showing up and everybody gets to park and they got to But instead of riding a roller coaster, they're getting an essential basic need. Just another example of people trying to respond to

reality that people in Portage County are struggling. What would your call to action be to people that see these problems and say, well, why isn't anybody helping? And they have time and perhaps resources. know, engage in your local township, government, in your local village or city, as well as local community organizations that are trying to do this in every

City, Village and Township in Portage County, including United Way, which is a national organization that you can tap into to figure out how you can volunteer. And going back to what Bill said about getting involved in your local government, that's a huge way for you to make a change because we can act on an individual level, but we have to do it collaboratively. Take it from John Kennedy himself, a civil servant in the local government. What we all have to do is be

citizens who are engaged collaboratively to solve problems. If we try to attack tackle this stuff individually, we'll never solve anything, will we? Never. We have to work in concert as difficult and challenging as that is. I'm not saying it's easy, but we've got to work together or it's all going to fall apart. We can't sit back and just say, put our heads in the sand and say, well,

Patrick Childers (: 09:42

I'm not happy with this or I'm not happy with that and it'll all be okay. I'm going to be taken care of. We can't just vote every four years and hope our favorite candidate is going to solve all of our problems. We can't just point our finger at our neighbors and say, it weren't for them, we'd be fine. And I think most importantly, we can't sit around and wait for someone with the power to make change happen, to come along and save the day. We are each that person with the power to make change. We all can help solve this problem.

It is not insurmountable. It is complicated, but we have to do something. We all have an obligation, I think, as citizens to think about, to worry about, and try to help our local residents get the food they need to live.

Patrick Childers (: 10:46

When we asked County Commissioner Sabrina Christian Bennett what individuals could do to step up and help relieve food insecurity in their region, she focused more on a community-based level, encouraged more co-ops. Co-ops with residents and farmers, or even regional food hubs to where residents could go there and get greatly discounted food, and maybe at both prices.

I would encourage them to look into growing vegetables and stuff like that, be a little more sustaining and maybe working, volunteering at the food cupboards to really see it. Because you know what, you hear about it, but until, I'm like a vision person. So until I actually see it, it doesn't necessarily resonate with people.

You know, I'm a visual learner myself. I totally understand where Sabrina's coming from. I learned a lot spending a whole day following around rural relief, seeing Jason and Rena build a menu, pack up their food at the food bank, then meeting them at the pantry location to learn that they'd spent the entire afternoon supplementing their supplies, chatting with their volunteers and with the folks that came to pick up groceries, and then overhearing them speak with Bill about new grants, which they then go home to apply for after a long day.

I frankly did not know how much work went into getting that one bag of groceries to one person, let alone 20 or 150. So to wrap up the series, we're bringing a local journalist to really get into the causes of the food insecurity crisis and how to expand the great work being done so that the basic needs of this county can actually be met. And we reveal a surprising update to one of the organizations that we got to know throughout this series.

Patrick Childers (: 12:44

I'm the publisher and founder of The Portager. It's a local newspaper that I started in 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. And we've been running it for the last five years and it's still growing. And a lot of people love to read us because they believe in the mission, which is that local news can connect communities and solve problems by keeping everyone on the same page and informed. Great. Love it. Okay. So.

set the stage for me here. Like, what was the impetus for this project and telling the story of food insecurity in Portage County? Like, why is this an important story to tell right now? So this really started when we were looking for an opportunity to partner with a local nonprofit back in Northeast Ohio, where Patrick and I were born and raised. And through

nd we started this project in: 2022

food pricing, and just the difficulty of people to get the amount of calories at the end of the day, quality calories that they needed. And so we identified that pretty early on in our conversations with United Way as a possible partnership opportunity with them. And so that's really where we started. Ben was listening to an episode, was it This American Life?

That's right. Yeah. a day in the life of a... The Golden Apple Diner in Chicago. they do this, they have a reporter slash journalist in there for 24 hours. And it is just capturing 24 hours in the day of like a diner. And so once we kind of set it on this food insecurity idea, we wanted to effectively do like a day in the life of the...

Patrick Childers (: 15:04

organizations and people that are trying to solve food insecurity. Yeah, I feel like initially we were like, let's follow around a small food pantry for a day and see what goes into this and quickly learned that there's a lot that goes into it. And so we kind of worked our way from there backwards or upwards into a larger scale of what's going on on a county and even a state level. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the portager, we, we cover.

food insecurity as much as we can, but it really is one of these issues that it becomes so big of a problem, just such a big scale problem with so many different people trying to fix it. So many people affected by it that you can really only cover a sliver of it. So when COVID hit, you know, we were doing a lot of stories about the public health emergency, but I would say most of the stories we were covering were actually food stories. I thought, I thought it was interesting that COVID actually became

It's sort of like it peeled back this one layer of safety net that people had and it revealed all of these, these hidden problems that were just below the surface. And, to our benefit as a society and particularly, would say in Portage County, there emerged a whole society response to address.

this now widespread need for all manner of things, transportation, food, jobs, to the extent that people could provide help to people, to working folks. But that, wasn't anyone's individual moral failing that resulted in their misfortune. was a public health emergency that did it. Has anything remained from that period of time? Are there any institutions or processes or funding or?

efforts that have survived that period of time? Well, rural relief is closed. What happened? So they cited lack of funding and health concerns as the reason that they had to close. And we've reached out to Jason and Rina and haven't heard back from them. the drive through pop-up pantry has remained. And that was an innovation during quarantine. And

Patrick Childers (: 17:27

It was really an eye opener because the stigma around getting help and asking for food and accepting food that you're offered is so heavy. And I feel like people, while it is important that people are able to shop the shelves with dignity at the Akron Ketten food bank, I feel that a lot of people are more comfortable to stay in their car with their windows up and pull up and get food in their trunk and drive off.

because it's a little more anonymous perhaps, and it's a bit more convenient, and you can be in the comfort of your car with whatever you're listening to on your speakers. Maybe you're talking to somebody on the phone. You don't really have to be as in public. Because again, there's just the stigma around being hungry, which is horrific. I we can't admit that we're hungry. I ended up on Snap during quarantine.

And I continued to be on snap when I moved out to Portland, Oregon, in order to supplement my income as I was trying to find work. And I've talked to other folks who also found these resources during this international health crisis and have maintained their knowledge and their usage of these resources. So I feel like we've learned something.

a bit on an individual level here and there and that we have learned something on an institutional level as far as organizations who are already looking to help like United Way. mean, that's all they do is try to help people. I'm not sure that we learned how to address it on a societal level, but I do think people are more aware of the ugliness beneath the veil of the American dream than they were pre-COVID.

but the funding has in the last four months just gone away completely. I mean, it's worse than it was pre-COVID with all of these recent bills that have been passed. So we're making progress in one direction, but not in the place where the wealth and the resources are, I fear. Yeah. It seems like there are a lot of private sector solutions cropping up like United Way, the food bank.

Patrick Childers (: 19:53

They're surviving, I guess, on a lot of donations, but also on some federal funding. If the federal funding goes away, they're going to rely even more on private donations. And they're really on their own to try to figure out distribution and awareness. There's no government supporting that work. So I got the sense that a lot of a lot of food isn't reaching people who need the food. the federal government is completely abdicating its role.

I don't expect the state to really step in in any meaningful way either. that leaves us with local government. Do you see a bigger role for city and county government to step up? That is a challenging question. think that the political environment in Portage County makes it difficult for movements on

topics like this to get any real traction. And that is primarily because for the last 20 years since the Tea Party movement that started in 08, 09, the flavor of the Republican Party in Portage County has just turned very anti helping people live better lives and very much focused on, I get mine and that's the most important thing.

And I think what that does is that causes every possible solution that can be funneled through the government, which can do work unlike any other organization on like in a community. Right. The government can always do things that no private entity ever could do. The Portage County government is no longer designed to make the

community and the total health of Portage County is no longer a focus. And it's really on an individualized betterment. And that underlying narrative will always prevent a county like Portage County from getting to a spot where people really feel like they can live there and they can prosper. that's a failing of

Patrick Childers (: 22:16

the populace, it's a failing of messaging, it's a failing of leadership on both the Republican and Democratic side for not painting a better vision for that. And it's a very frustrating to see, especially as someone who hasn't lived there now for 15 years and has just kind of seen this happen to a place that we called home. Yeah. And I think that, again, there are plenty of individuals that

would love to spend their time as civil servants helping hungry children find food. But I fear that we are so divided over individualistic, selfish goals and platforms that to run on a platform that serves everybody

It means that you're not going to get elected. And then how are you supposed to do any work if you don't get elected? Totally. My thesis with the Portager is that when national politics is kept in its place, which is in some sphere, almost reserved for entertainment in most people's minds, it's really just a reality show playing out on television or on clickbait websites.

And if you leave that where it is, and you just focus on community stories and people and the needs of the people you interact with at the grocery store or on the street or at work, you can really almost ignore all of that. And no ideology is required to solve interpersonal problems that can be solved through simple collaboration.

If everyone recognizes that a child should be able to eat, well, that's just a very obvious problem that we should all worry about solving. Okay. I'll say this. I travel the country as a musician and most of the groups of musicians that I travel with have very progressive humanitarian messaging behind

Patrick Childers (: 24:41

their music behind their movements. And we go to places that were read through and through on national, state, local elections. And we still manage to connect as humans every time because despite the hot topic issues and despite

economic minutiae that we want to squabble over. We all can agree that there is no reason that there should be children starving in America. It makes no sense to anybody. It makes no sense to anybody on either side of this supposed political spectrum, but it takes a lot of work to cut through the noise.

And I've found that music is a great uniter. I've found that talking about food insecurity gets people on the same page, perhaps in the same room, but then we ask, how do we fix it? And people go back to, it's your favorite politician's fault and it's your favorite politician's fault. And I believe that part of this is we need to not treat our civil servants as royalty or celebrities.

They're civil servants and we need to stop treating people as individuals and start treating them as citizens. We need to see ourselves as citizens, not individuals and start doing our part as neighbors and as community members. The coffee shop, that's where you argue about politics. You don't argue about politics when kids are starving. That's inappropriate and does not lead to any solutions oriented conversations.

Did you want to talk more about something positive? Are there any, are there any good institutions working in Portage County that are worth highlighting and saying this is something we should support? So I think that institutions like United Way work every day to help people identify and solve problems. It's incredible to see the way that they connect the dots between the individuals who need.

Patrick Childers (: 27:09

and between the organizations that can provide. All of those individuals who need and are willing to ask for help, I have been extremely moved by their bravery to step out of their comfort zone in order to take advantage of services. I've been extremely moved by the folks running small food pantries all around Portage County to make sure that people are fed. I mean, they're doing this on top of full-time jobs.

on top of raising their own families with their own monetary and financial issues themselves. And I've been extremely impressed by the people in power that we've talked to who have used their power to help. There is a solution. We just need to figure out how to get everybody on the same page, even if it's just for a couple hours every other week, even if it's a quarterly four hour meeting.

just to bring people together to address this issue because there's a lot of great ideas out there. They just need to happen all at the same time and in conjunction with one another. What do you think, Ben? Yeah, I mean, I think to what I do professionally and I attempt in the work that I do to get organizations to focus. That's the number one way that I spend my time.

And I would want to see a Portage County that is focused on ensuring that no child in Portage County is hungry. Like, let's start there as a very clear shared vision. And then let's see what happens after we get to that point. Like, let's solve that core fundamental issue that there's anywhere between one in seven and one in six children.

who don't know where their next meal is coming from, and then see what the next big thing that we want to tackle is going to be. And the big thing that we heard talking to all of these groups is just that it is difficult to get everybody on board moving in the same direction, right? And that is a lack of focus and clarity. And I think positioning

Patrick Childers (: 29:34

all of these organizations around a shared goal makes it so much easier as you're off there doing then your individual work at your individual organization to reflect back and simply say, does this help us achieve our shared goal of no kid hungry in Portage County or does it not? And it makes it very then easy for everybody throughout an organization to be rowing in the same direction. Yeah. I would say that.

As we've combed through the data and walked through the day to day operations of people trying to solve food insecurity and just facing this data head on, because these are starving people. These aren't just numbers. Portage County is a microcosm of what's happening all over this country. And I would love if Portage County

could be a microcosm of a solution to this problem instead. How about this? Let's see which small county in America can work together despite political differences and resource challenges and focus and prioritize solving this issue and be an example of how to get food into every child, adult, elderly person's belly. And then let that be

the microcosm that starts a revolution to change the way that we interact in order to feed our people. I would love to see it happen in Portage County. I'd love to see it happen elsewhere as well. We're all in the same place dealing with this. And I hope that this can illustrate to people that it's not a far away problem. It's right at home. And maybe the solutions are right here as well. Yeah. Well said, Patrick. Thanks, brother. And thank you for tuning in.

We've reached the conclusion of our series. I hope this inspires you to take a look at the community that you live in, the people who make up that community, and the agency that you have as a citizen and as a neighbor to put aside hot topic differences, cut through the noise, and come together to solve this problem. Because while this is the end of our podcast, I hope this is just the beginning of the effort toward a united relief.

Patrick Childers (: 32:02

Thanks for joining us. United Relief is an odd conduit media production developed and produced by us, Ben and Patrick Childers. It's edited, mixed and mastered by Patrick, with fact-checking by Dash Lewis, story editing by Jenna Marson, and artwork by Migs Sunny. The series contains original music and sound design by L.T. Headtrip. This episode also has music performed by Pear and Flow. Special thanks to United Way Portage County in Ohio.

United Way is an international organization with 1,200 chapters in the U.S. alone. If you or someone you know are suffering from food insecurity and live in the U.S., we encourage you to dial 211 or visit 211.org and find out what services are available to you. They're here to help. You can also reach out to your local food bank. You'll find a list of food banks throughout the U.S. at feedingamerica.org. If you're eager to help, you can go to unitedway.org and find your local United Way. You can also discover volunteer opportunities through 211.

Get in touch with your local representatives to find out what they're doing to help relieve food insecurity in your area and how you can pitch in. Also, don't forget to meet your neighbors and ask what you can do in your immediate community. Find the links in our show notes. If you have an untold story about community impact and are looking for help telling it via podcasting, contact us at services at oddconduitmedia.com. And you can learn more about us on the web at oddconduitmedia.com.