- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- How to help people most in need, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian, thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Sally Jones Heinz, President and CEO of MIFA, thanks for being here again.

- Thank you.

- Along with Cathy Pope, President and CEO of the Mid-South Food Bank.

Thank you for being here again.

- Thank you.

- And Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

As we go into the holiday season, we've often had you on, Sally, and you and your predecessor on, just to kind of talk about the increased need, and things people can do.

And we'll get to those parts soon.

This year there is also the backdrop of, you know, huge inflation that's affecting food, it's affecting everything, it's affecting everyone, and their budgets, and their ability to help out organizations like you.

And this prospect of some sort of economic downturn, or recession that people are talking about next year, is, you guys look into this, you know, this holiday season, but also into, I'm sure you're doing budgeting, or have done budgeting and planning for next year in trying to anticipate what kind of economic downturn, that it could decrease peoples' ability to give, even as the need goes up.

And so how worried are you?

I'll start with you, Sally.

- That's a big question.

Well, certainly those are all concerns.

Memphis is such a generous community, and has always stood up to fill gaps, especially I think for social services organizations.

But Cathy and I were talking earlier about the extra support that came through the government to help us meet the need, especially in regards to hunger, where I think we're focused.

And there are worries that funding will be decreasing while the need stays so high.

- Most of that being federal money out of the COVID relief packages, I assume?

- Yes.

- So for you, I mean, again, how much worry, again, and add that into it too, decreasing funding from the federal government, potential increased need, and more pressure on donors?

- Yeah, and I agree with Sally.

We're both looking at what it's going to look like in the near future, because we are both still seeing high numbers of need from our clients.

Maybe not as high as in the very beginning of the pandemic, that summer of 2020.

But because of inflation, because of rent, because of utilities and all of that, we're still, you know, trying to recover from COVID.

So we're kind of getting a double whammy.

We are at the Food Bank, because we need such large quantities of food that we're distributing.

So just to give you a number, prior to the pandemic, and we serve 31 counties, so we serve more than Shelby County.

We were serving 16.7 million pounds of food in a 12-month period.

And at the height of the pandemic, we were up to 55 million pounds.

- That's remarkable.

- It's incredible, I still even look back, I don't even know how we did it, but with a great staff that worked very hard.

But we are constantly looking at, where is the food?

And as Sally was talking about, we had a couple of federal programs, that we did very well here in the Mid-South with, with extra food.

Tennessee Emergency Management stepped up, there was a Farmers to Families Food Box Program that stepped up.

Both of those are gone, and that was 35% of what we served.

So a little concerned, but again, as Sally said, this is a really generous community.

So when they know the need, they step up and make sure that we can provide.

- Yeah, I'm gonna bring in Bill.

- And do the supply-chain problems that our retailers have had, has that been an impact as well on the supply?

- Big, big impact for us.

So when we need to order a truckload of green beans, for example, and of course we're ordering 10, before we would just put the bid out to three suppliers, and we would have the load in seven days.

And now we're working really hard to even get suppliers that will be competitive with price.

Our price has gone up about 25% in ordering that food, and transportation's up 35%.

So we're having to work really hard to find that food and get the commitment from the supplier that we can have it in a reasonable amount of time.

I mean, when we need food, twelve weeks is not a reasonable amount of time.

So that has been a big problem for us.

- All right, right.

And Sally, how does that translate, in you providing a wide variety of services as well?

- Well, in terms of food, we are certainly seeing that.

You know, Memphis has the highest rate of food insecurity, the third-highest rate of food insecurity for seniors, of any large metropolitan area in the United States.

It used to be number one, and so it's a figure that we can impact through service.

So certainly in terms of the seniors that MIFA serves, we want to expand and we want to serve more.

The federal reimbursal rate for the meal that we provide, of course doesn't cover the cost.

So our generous community covers that cost, that gap.

And as that continues to increase because of inflation, because of food costs, because of gas costs, it's a bigger gap to fill, and impacts the number of seniors that we're able to provide meals to.

- So in terms of people needing help, it sounds like we're doing a little better than we were at the onset of the pandemic, but it's a much more complex problem now, probably than it was, even with this pandemic, that was unlike anything any of us have seen.

- Right, and I think that's specifically for senior hunger.

Cathy may have some data on the larger needs in the community, as regards to hunger.

But seniors, and I think that one thing Cathy and I wanna make our community aware of, is how the Food Bank and MIFA collaborate.

So that, as you just said, the needs are complex.

They're not the same for any particular senior, and we want to provide that food assistance that is most meaningful for them.

So, and for MIFA, we are, you know, providing, serving perhaps the most food insecure that, for seniors who really, because of a physical disability, are unable to even prepare their own meal.

So we have to get that prepared meal to them daily.

Whereas the Food Bank has, you know, does different things to assist the seniors in our community.

- Right, so Sally is serving them the meal already prepared, and then we can back that up with a food box, if they're able to prepare their own meals, or they have family members that can help them do that.

So we're able to get them a food box, but then we also do fresh produce.

So we have what's called Now trucks, and this was part of Estella, was able, my predecessor was able to help with that, with a grant from United Healthcare.

But we have trucks that go around and deliver fresh produce to senior housing in Memphis.

We are also going into the rural community now, but we'll go to, like, Church Health, and we're helping with patients that they have.

So we're really excited to be able to get that fresh produce out there to them.

But as Sally said, we work very collaboratively, but serve our community in a bit of a different way.

- And I think the convenient image that a lot of people have when you say "food bank", is they think, "Oh, okay, rows and rows of canned goods."

You're sourcing much more than that.

- We are, and besides sourcing it from, because you know, we do retail store-level pickup, so we are collecting items every day from our Kroger, Walmart, Costco partners, we're purchasing fresh produce too.

And then some of the federal funding that we got through COVID, we were able to get food boxes.

There's a co-op in Georgia that we are a part of, Southeast Regional Co-op, and we're able to get a variety of fresh produce in a box, and we're able to give that to the client.

And I will tell you on a national level, our food bank ranks very high with foods to encourage.

So we look at all of the food that we're serving, and we do a pretty good job of giving healthy items.

- I wanted to, along with food, we start with food.

But also MIFA, you do a lot of work with the homeless.

You do, obviously Meals on Wheels is what people maybe best know you for that.

But also homeless, you know, homeless families, people have emergencies, suddenly have just lost their home and need temporary housing, rapid rehousing, as you all call it.

Then utility, rent, mortgage assistance for households who have lost income, experience crises.

So there's this other range of stuff.

You know, talking holistically about... And I think of a show, and I always reference this show, we did with Kelsey Johnson who runs the Hospitality Hub that is focused on homelessness.

And I asked him, "Is your mission to end homelessness?"

And he said, "No, our mission is to end homelessness for you," because there's always gonna be home... there are all these systemic reasons, and he articulated it way better than I ever will.

But you know, sadly, there will always be PTSD, there will always be mental health issues, always be prison reentry, there'll always be domestic violence, sadly.

So he said, you know, we just want to figure out why are you homeless, and how can we help you get housed?

How do you all approach that?

I'll start with you, Sally, like these, 'cause I think people listen sometimes and think this is amazing work you do.

And without criticism and without qualification, how do we end the need for groups like you?

Or how do we mitigate or minimize the needs for...

I mean, right, in an ideal world you wouldn't exist, but you will exist forever, right.

How do you approach it in this holistic way?

Or is that even possible for you all, because you're so focused on just meeting the immediate needs?

- Well, the goal, similar to Kelsey, MIFA's goal would be that no family, 'cause we are really focused on serving households that are families, that no family sleeps on the street.

That has been a challenge because of the lack of shelter in our community.

So you may know that, really, during the pandemic, we relied on hotel rooms, because that's where we were able to shelter people.

But I think it is, rapid rehousing, the goal to get families into their own apartments of their choosing, near schools for their children.

That is also more of a challenge now, because of affordable housing, or the lack thereof of affordable housing.

So we are also focused on the immediate need of, how do we prevent a family forever getting into that situation.

And in a way, it's another collaboration that we would have with the Food Bank.

Because a family would present with perhaps, we need to help with the utility bill, we need help with the rent, but we also need food.

We had a speaker at MIFA recently who said, you know, rent eats first.

That's gonna be the first bill you pay.

So if that's it, the Food Bank can step in and help that family with food.

- Again, holistic approaches to the causes of food insecurity or, you know?

And can you guys get to that, or is that just not possible?

And I'm not faulting you if that's the answer.

- Well, we hope it is possible, but we're just like Sally, we are a nonprofit, and we're working with food insecurity, and we try to stay in our lane with that, because we can't solve poverty, right?

But we know that if we have a family, or an individual that's hungry, there are other complications in their life that they need help and support with.

So we are part of, here in the Mid-South, it's called Driving the Dream out of United Way.

But we are able to take a family if they come to us and they need food, then we get them into a case manager that will look to see, "Well, okay, Cathy needs food "for her family, but is she in reasonable housing, "safe housing?

Do the children need healthcare or dentists?"

So I think we do a really good job here in our community of helping and supporting other nonprofits to try to take care of the whole family.

- Yeah, Bill?

- Your point about families, is the system that both of your organizations work in, the larger system, is it geared to really meet the needs of a family experiencing homelessness versus just one person?

And how many people do you see, where the family has already had to break up in order to deal with what they're going through?

- I don't know that I have specific data that I can answer the last part of your question.

But back to the speaker that we had recently at MIFA, Stephanie Land, the author of "Maid".

And she experienced homelessness while raising her daughter.

And she tried to work, and she tried to work as a maid.

And those hours didn't coincide with going to apply for food stamps, or going to apply for the assistance that she needed.

So the first part of your question, I think sort of about systems, I think that one of the things about the COVID pandemic was exposing that systems weren't necessarily built for the people who needed assistance.

They were often built for the people who were providing it.

And I think that we have seen some change and some movement to more equitable and reasonable systems that I hope are more helpful.

- And of course the Food Bank works with a lot of these organizations as well, supplying them.

What's your experience with how this works for families who are in homelessness?

- Yes, and again, we supply the food, but we work with a lot of partner agencies.

We have over 300 in the Mid-South, and we make sure that if you're hungry in Tate County, Mississippi, for example, you're going to that neighborhood pantry.

But the Food Bank's responsibility is to make sure they have food to serve that family.

So we have partners that are working with homelessness, and we make sure that we provide a special food box for that reason.

So if they're doing a distribution... For example, I was at Neighborhood Christian recently, and homeless people can come in there and get food.

And we wanna make sure that they have a smaller box, because usually when we do a mobile pantry, I hope that people saw us working very hard during the pandemic.

If you saw long lines of cars waiting for food, that was a Food Bank-sponsored pantry.

We increased the mobile distributions that we did during COVID so we could meet the need.

But we also have those specialty boxes for the homeless, for example, at Neighborhood Christian, or Catholic Charities is another one that works here.

So we work with our partner agencies to see what their specific need is, and try to meet that need.

I think one thing with the Food Bank that sometimes escapes people is we aren't usually the direct service to the client.

We really support our partner agencies to do that.

We did step-up during the pandemic, like I said, a lot of our partner agencies just couldn't handle the load, they're used to serving 50 families, and 300 are needing service.

So we are able to pivot, I think, because of partners and collaborators like MIFA.

- Well, and also the preparation, for instance, it's not as simple as just, "Here's food," it's "Here's food for someone who may not have any electricity."

It's food for children who may get food during the school week, but there's that two-day weekend when they don't have a regular food source, right?

- Exactly, and one point to that, for the school children, our food bank is really ramping up our school pantries that we're doing.

We're really seeing that if the child needs food on the weekend, the family's needing it as well.

So those are two things that we're doing in our school system, working with Shelby County Schools specifically, is to make sure that the family has food from a food box, but then the children have, what we know as BackPack, that's been around for a long time.

But those products are different, you know, the BackPack is pop-top, the child can take care of themselves if they need to.

And then again, a lot of the food, yes, it's canned items, but if our school pantries, and we're working on this, have availability for frozen and refrigerated food, then we're able to provide them protein, and fresh produce, and that type thing.

So we are trying to meet those specific needs.

And in fact, we partner with Sally as well.

If there are other families that she knows about, seniors specifically, we have a senior box, it's low sodium for the canned food.

You know, it's milk, it's cereal, it's those type things for the seniors.

So we do look to see what is the specific need of our client and try to meet that specific need.

- And Sally, what is the on-ramp for case work with the people you see?

Is it you seeing a need?

Is it the people experiencing these difficulties asking for help, or how does that work?

- Well, in terms of our, I'll talk about Meals on Wheels again, which is where I have focused most today.

But we want to expand that, and we are continually looking at that program to see what we can do to better meet the needs of those seniors and make their lives better.

We've recently hired a senior navigator to better, who can work with clients, to connect them with needs.

And one program that we just are piloting that I think is really exciting, we're working with a group of 50.

And have given these 50 senior clients tablets and wifi access, because isolation is an enormous issue for our senior clients.

They live alone, they don't have family, but with this tablet they can email and they can FaceTime with family that may be out of town.

And we're already seeing just really positive response to that.

- You had mentioned during, I think I had this right, during COVID because of, you know, isolation, and particularly with seniors.

And so you're having to sort of drop food, and not interact, whereas normally people dropping food would interact.

And that might be often the only person that that senior would talk to every day.

- Right.

- You know?

And it just was companionship, and a bit of... You know, you talked about calling people more, and getting on the phone with people more, just somehow to connect with them.

Have you been able to continue that?

I mean it's a lot, but I'm curious.

- We have, we are back to more delivery days per week.

- Yeah.

- But we still need volunteers as we grow.

But we did start what we call the MyPhone Buddy, and volunteers who maybe had quit delivering were able to call the clients that they already knew, or new clients.

And isolation, those social determinants of health, like poverty and isolation, can be as detrimental as lack of nutrition.

So we really are focused on anything we can layer on to make that Meals on Wheels program more impactful.

- Switching back to your work with homelessness and with families.

We, we had Dorcas Young, the head of Shelby County Community Services, I don't know when, time has no meaning.

It was in the, I think in the spring.

And she talked about how, you know, what you're talking about, the affordability crisis.

And I think Steve Barlow was on, and there's some other folks on, talking about, look, there actually is money.

Dorcas said, "For a lot of people, I can get them money.

I can get them," you know, not...

I think she, you know, $1,000-$1,500 a month, to go towards rental assistance, "I can't find anywhere they can go."

And that really resonated with me, that there is... she was, I don't wanna misquote her and say that there's plenty of money, but there is money for many of these families, and there's just nowhere to put them.

- And that is what we are finding, at MIFA families, that formally would stay in shelter for two weeks before they could find an apartment, we were able to help them.

That's now 30, 60, even 90 days.

- Yeah.

- Because it's just very difficult to find a place.

- And then the quality of, can vary.

- As we say, "We have affordable housing, we don't have quality affordable housing."

- You mentioned the schools, and apologies if I put...

There was some talk about, I mean for a while there, and maybe they're still doing it, the school system federally was doing three meals a day for qualified students.

Are they still doing three meals a day?

I mean, up to three meals a day?

Or does that, I mean, where are you supplementing what the federal government maybe isn't?

- The school system when, you know, they do the breakfast and lunch at school.

- Yeah.

- And then they'll do an after-school snack or a supper.

And that may be at Boys & Girls Clubs, and we do some of that, the Food Bank.

We actually, at some Boys & Girls Clubs, we're serving hot meals to the children who are there for whatever the enrichment activity is after school.

So Shelby County still is doing that.

You know, every child that needs that meal is not getting it in the evening.

You know, some may go home, or whatever it will be.

So yes, we work very closely with Shelby County Schools to try to see how we can better serve our children when they're out of school.

- You mentioned your partners at some of the big grocery stores.

People will talk about, in your line of work, you know, food waste with restaurants, and with, you know...

I mean there's a crazy thing about food labels.

A lot of food-label expiration dates, it doesn't mean that on that date the food has gone bad.

It's just the manufacturer of the food would prefer you did.

It may not be whatever it is, but it's not bad, it's completely healthy, it's not rotten, there's nothing to...

So how much of that do you do, of getting into what could it otherwise be, food waste from a grocery store, and also maybe even restaurants?

- Oh yeah, I'm so excited to talk about this, because I think it's something that, even as a food bank, we don't talk about a lot, is what a great job we're doing of rescuing food.

That, 10 years ago, for example, would've gone in our city and county dumps, perfectly edible.

So we're on the road every day with our trucks, and we're picking up from the partners that we just talked about, Kroger, Walmart, Costco.

And we bring it back to the Food Bank, and we have volunteers, just like we're always talking about, we need volunteers.

We have to touch that food, right?

We wanna check it for food safety.

So we train our volunteers to understand what is food, what is safe.

And we look at it like we're not keeping any food that we wouldn't serve our own families.

But I will tell you our retail partners do a really good job of donating what is very salvageable food.

So then we get all of that food and put it in our inventory, and it can go out the door to families pretty quickly.

So we're doing a lot of that.

But then we also have something called Meal Connect.

And that is a great program here, it's all over the country, but we've just introduced it in the Mid-South over the last three years.

But if a restaurant has food, or a convention has been in town, catering, any type of thing.

University of Memphis, all of these places that have prepared food, they're able to go on their mobile app and put in what they have.

And we have trained volunteers, and given them the warming blankets, and all of the supplies that we need.

We were able to do that with a lot of grant funding previously.

But we connect those two.

So if you are a convention center, and you've just had a convention, you put in what the food is, a volunteer will accept that delivery.

And then we have partners that are ready to take that already prepared food.

So we're really ramping that up, and I think we're doing a pretty good job, again, of rescuing food that's perfectly edible.

- Just with less than a minute left, and apologies.

Both of you talked about volunteers, you talked about donations, it's midsouthfoodbank.org?

People can learn more, - Yes.

- they can volunteer to do what?

- Just that, help us with going through those food items to check for food safety, categorizing that food, putting together special food boxes for seniors, homeless, and children.

- Okay, and this is not just a, need at the holidays, to be clear.

We're kind of doing it as part of going into the holiday season.

Same, it's mifa.org, you've got all kinds of information in there about donating, and getting involved with various programs.

- Yes, mifa.org, the biggest need is for meal deliveries, but there are other opportunities as well, especially during the holiday season.

- Okay, well thank you both, appreciate you both being here.

Thank you, Bill.

And thank you for joining us, that is all the time we have this week.

If you missed any of the show, you can get the full episode at wkno.org.

Or you can go to YouTube and just search for "Behind the Headlines".

You can also go to The Daily Memphian site to get that.

We also have a podcast version of the show, which has another five minutes or so with our guests.

You can get that on iTunes, Spotify, The Daily Memphian site, wkno.org, or wherever you get your podcast.

Thanks very much and we'll see you next week.

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]