Winooski Food Shelf seeing high demand since pandemic
Rebecca Mamy stood outside the United Methodist Church on a Saturday in mid-April, surrounded by bags filled with potatoes, onions, chicken and fruit from the Winooski Food Shelf.
Mamy, 29, has a husband, four children and a fifth on the way to feed at home in Winooski. In 2019, she came to the city as a refugee from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. She suffered with Covid-19 during a previous pregnancy and has embraced the opportunity to access healthy food in her new community.
“This is a good thing,” Mamy said as she waited for her husband to pick her up from the free pantry. “I can say thank you to the people who do this. Yeah, it's helped us.”
The food shelf, a service of the church on West Allen Street, welcomes visitors on the second and fourth Wednesday and Saturday of the month. Winooski residents may pick up at the food shelf one Wednesday per month and both Saturdays.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for food assistance across Vermont spiked. Vermont Foodbank, a statewide provider, distributed 8 million to 10 million pounds of food per year prior to the pandemic. That amount nearly doubled to more than 19 million pounds after the virus hit, said Carrie Stahler, the Vermont Foodbank’s government and public affairs officer. Food distributions have since come down from the Covid highs but still reached 12.5 million pounds last year. In 2024, the foodbank estimates it will give out almost 15 million pounds of food.
Stahler said the main factor in the climbing need is the termination of 3SquaresVT, the state program that administers the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The federal government injected extra SNAP money during the pandemic, but the additional funds went away in April 2023. For Vermonters, this “precarious economic situation,” as Stahler described it, grew worse after disastrous flooding in July destroyed many residents' homes and businesses.
Linda Howe, director of the Winooski food shelf for more than 10 years, said it now feeds about 1,000 families each month. During the pandemic, Howe said, the number of pantry patrons was much larger, though she didn’t provide a specific amount.
Inside the church, the pantry occupies one big room. Folding tables hold different bags filled with a variety of items for meals. One is designated the “traditional American bag” of pantry staples. Another table has vegetarian bags with lentils and rice. In the back of the room, shelves are stacked with canned goods and cereal boxes.
The Winooski food shelf relies entirely on volunteers, many of them older residents, to pack the pick-up bags and stack the shelves.
“This is senior power, I’ll tell ya that,” Howe said, sitting near the cereal shelf as she watched over the operation. Donors provide funds that the church uses to buy goods for the pantry, and local supermarkets also donate products.
In Winooski, the primary barriers for those who rely on the food shelf are language and transportation, both volunteers and pantry patrons said.
The city has a large population of new Americans, like Mamy, whose primary language is not English. Nepali is the most common non-English language that pantry volunteers hear, Howe said. Others speak Swahili, Croatian, Spanish, Creole and Vietnamese.
Mamy, who speaks Swahili, said she has little problem with language obstacles.“I can say to translate is not difficult,” she said. “If you want, you say ‘yes.’ If you don’t want, you say ‘no.’ ”
Nor Du, another pantry visitor, came to Winooski from Burma and speaks Karen. “My cousin has a problem with the language,” Du said of his relative’s visits to the food shelf.
The older generation of new Americans are more likely to struggle with English but also are more likely to use the food pantry, Howe said. If they come by car to pick up food, younger kids who accompany them will sometimes translate, said Bob Zwonik, a food shelf volunteer.
However, the pantry needs volunteers who can translate and better serve its patrons in their own languages, he added.
As for transportation needs, Zwonik said he has seen many pantry visitors show up on foot. “Some of them, they put the box on their head and they'll just start walking down West Allen Street.”
Pantry visitors sometimes bring carts and wheel them home. Zwonik has helped carry bags to clients’ homes.
He also would like the pantry to procure a pickup truck for volunteers to shop for groceries. They trek from Costco in Colchester to the Vermont Foodbank in Barre, and a truck could hold more food than their cars can.
Mamy often rides the bus to visit the pantry, or her husband will drive her home. With her overflowing bags of food, she has limited transportation options.
“You see my condition?” she said, pointing to her swollen belly. “Yeah, I can’t walk with this.”