Larry Arakaki helps stock a dwindly supply of food in
the foodbank's refrigerator yesterday.
Photo by Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin

All that the operators of more than 100 food pantries on Oahu need to measure is the empty spaces on the shelves in food pantries serving the needy.

The Salvation Army's Leeward distribution center in Aiea handed out 147 food baskets in June, compared with 45 last June, said Capt. John Chamness. His shelves were empty but received emergency help last week from other agencies.

He said individual donors tend to be generous at holiday time, but "hunger knows no season."

"The demand has changed big time," said Mariellen Byrnes Jones of the Community Clearing House, which distributes 20 to 40 boxes of nonperishable food daily to clients referred by several social services agencies.

"As far as canned goods go, we have zip."

"Summer can be a hard time" for low-income families because children are not receiving school meals, said Sharon Chiarucci, director of the Catholic Diocese Office of Social Ministry.

"I haven't heard that the shelves are bare, but the demand is definitely up," she said. Thirty of the 35 Catholic parishes on Oahu operate food outreach programs. The three largest distribute 350 to 500 boxes of food per month, she said.

Chad Buchanan, social services coordinator for the Salvation Army islandwide, said "it has a lot to do with the welfare reductions. About 70 percent of the people coming in here (at the Kauluwela center in Liliha) are all saying they have had reductions in food stamps and can't keep food on the table."

The agencies that help the needy are needy themselves this year because of federal and state cuts in social services aid.

Buchanan said the Salvation Army suffered a 60 percent cut last year in what it receives from federal emergency aid funds and state homeless grants.

The Community Clearing House formerly got a $6,000 annual grant from the Foodbank but got nothing this year because the state cut off its grant to the Foodbank, Byrnes Jones said.

The Foodbank, a supply source for most food outreach centers, stocks its shelves with usable but unsalable food donations from wholesalers and other corporations. It sells those goods, as well as items collected in public food drives, to nearly 200 agencies for 17 cents per pound.

Byrnes Jones said the clearinghouse is making up its boxes with frozen foods and dried goods; "canned goods are heavier so we don't buy them."

Chiarucci said outreach centers at churches are also hurting from the loss of Foodbank grants but are fortunate in having a regular support system from each parish. Congregations of other denominations collect donations and, if they can't staff their own food pantries, hand over the collections for distribution from Catholic food pantries, she said.

"Welfare recipients are one-half to two-thirds of the food pantry recipients," Chiarucci said. The rest are working people whose paychecks don't stretch far enough.

She pointed out that the state this year cut almost in half the general assistance payments to people whose disabilities render them unable to work. A person who formerly received $418 - 62 percent of the 1993 poverty line under government reckoning - now gets $268 a month.

Able-bodied welfare recipients face similar cuts as the federal government curtails Aid to Families with Dependent Children starting in January.

Chiarucci said one negative thing that happens regularly is that publicity for one agency's special need or fund drive will divert donations, to the detriment of others.

The Foodbank has started a series of regional forums to acquaint outreach services with one other.

She said agencies need to tap new resources, to stimulate generosity in a wider base of citizens.

Byrnes Jones agreed.

"We strike a chord in the public when it's a disaster or it's holiday time. We need awareness that there is a constant need."

The need goes beyond food, she said.

"I have 3,000 requests for school supplies and 500 requests for school clothes and not a single item of kids clothes on the shelves."

The Salvation Army's Chamness said, "It is important to keep this in front of the community, that people are struggling to make ends meet.

"We have a responsibility to our community to help one another. If we lose that aloha, we are really in trouble."