RIMSIE McCONIGA/Citizen photo
SPEAC volunteers, from left, Linda Tillinghast, Susie Hines and Cora Smith ensure the shelves are stocked at the pantry, located in Park Hill Presbyterian Church.
One simple mission motivated the Southern Platte Emergency Assistance Center (SPEAC) to form in 1989. The non-profit’s goal was to alleviate hunger in Southern Platte County.
A partnership was developed with local churches and United Services, which is now the Community Action Agency of Greater Kansas City.
Thirty years later, SPEAC is still going strong and has been an invaluable safety net for people in the area who have been laid off or lost their jobs due to COVID-19.
In 2019, SPEAC distributed around 21,500 bags of groceries and personal care items to more than 3,000 households.
For volunteers, Linda Tillinghast, Susie Hines and Cora Smith the work they do to ensure that people have food during these turbulent times is well worth their efforts.
The food bank is located and the food distributed at Park Hill Presbyterian Church, 819 Main St. in Parkville. The church not only provides the space, but also most of the utilities.
Area churches support the mission and around 100 volunteers, church members and non-church members alike take turns on different days of the week for several hours and sometimes longer to get the carts of food ready for people to pick up. They are also open one evening a month for pick-up.
SPEAC normally has around 20 to 25 families using the service per week, but since the virus started the numbers have doubled in some weeks. Eight families per day is about the maximum the food pantry can supply.
Many people don’t know the pantry exists so volunteers have been trying to get the word out that they want to help anyone who needs it.
“Normally, we’re limited to the southern Platte area, but we’ve expanded during the virus to help people who live further north in St. Joseph,” Hines said. “We help people as far away as Oak Grove and Independence. We’re trying to suggest to them pantries in other areas so they don’t have to travel so far but they don’t really know what’s available in their area.”
The smaller pantries in these other areas have not been able to stay open through COVID because they haven’t been able to set up an operating procedure for the families coming in and the volunteers. Many that have stayed open have had to cut, or change their hours in order to not have to close..
Helping people who call the food pantry find resources closer to where they live is something volunteers have been focusing on. There is a citywide hotline, 211, that volunteers share with callers.
The food pantry works with Harvesters Community Food Network, which is part of Feeding America, a nationwide network of 200 food banks. Under this arrangement SPEAC obtains food from Harvesters for a nominal fee. They also accept direct donations of food and money from local churches, businesses, community organizations and individuals.
SPEAC serves as the only United States Department of Agriculture distribution center for Southern Platte County. Harvesters’ website has a list of all the pantries in the area.
More and more local people are giving directly to Harvesters and usually donate money. Price Chopper has been a large contributor to Harvester.
They also get food from Aldi’s, Chick-fil-A, Olive Garden and Red Lobster. When Argosy Casino closed the food pantry received a lot of food from them. When food doesn’t sell in grocery stores it is often donated to the pantry.
A lot of times people clean out their cupboards and donate food to the pantry and volunteers are happy to accept it but look it over carefully for sell-by dates before they put it on the shelves.
This time of year, the pantry also gets a lot of free produce from farmers and people who have gardens in the area, plus the Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church has a neighborhood garden and they recently delivered freshly picked, cleaned and bagged lettuce
“There’s a local farmer that has an acre of land and raises food strictly to give to the food pantry,” Smith said. “And an egg man in the area sometimes drops off eggs for the pantry.”
Tillinghast has worked at the pantry the longest. She retired from teaching 15 years ago and she began volunteering.
“A great proportion of people coming in right now have lost their jobs due to the virus,” Tillinghast said. “We’ve got a lot of seniors that are on fixed incomes and we haven’t had as many of those coming in since the virus started. I think they may be a little concerned about going out. Recently we’ve started to see more of our regulars coming back. But I would say more than half of the people we’re seeing now are new since COVID started.”
Many of the calls the volunteers receive are from people who have lost their jobs and many of the callers say, “I’ve never done this before.”
“A lot of what we’re seeing is the combining of families,” Hines said. They lost their jobs and they can’t afford to live on their own, so maybe Grandma’s got the biggest house and she might have two or three families living with her. It’s not uncommon for us to get somebody that comes in who has eight or 10 people they need to take care of. Big families that have combined.”
Under normal circumstances the volunteers have them come into the pantry and they get a client choice sheet to choose what they want. But the process had to be redone when the virus hit and contact was severely limited.
Depending on the size of the family the volunteers collect the groceries off the shelves for people.
“We give them more probably than they would get if they were doing it themselves,” Smith said. Oftentimes when they call on the phone to make an appointment I will ask if they need diapers or feminine hygiene products or coffee, but otherwise we give them everything that we can and then we tell them we understand that they may not need all of this so to just give it to a friend or neighbor who will use it. As long as it gets used that’s the main thing.”
Those who need food call and make a reservation. The volunteers gather information on what items they need. When they arrive to check in they show staff their driver’s licenses through the glass. The grocery carts are then pushed outside and they load the groceries into their cars. When they finish they knock on the door and staff sanitizes the carts and then brings them back inside.
Smith, Hines and Tillinghast are constantly reminded of the struggles local families are going through and why their efforts are vital for many community members.
The last family of the day a few weeks ago was a mother and a grandmother who said how much they appreciated what they were given and that they wouldn’t have had food that night if it hadn’t been for the pantry.
One of the people the volunteers helped was a man whose real estate business had gone bust and who came for food for Thanksgiving and he was asked if he wanted a turkey. He said, “yes, and I was the one that used to supply the turkeys to the food pantry.”
A pharmacist who lost his business and a college professor who moved to the area to take care of his sick daughter and couldn’t find a job also needed help from the food pantry.
“These are people who at one time were giving members of the community and are now on the receiving end,” Hines said.
Although many of the stories the volunteers hear bring tears to their eyes, it shows them that everything they do is worthwhile. They don’t ask the circumstances when people call for help but many times people want to share what they’re going through and some just need someone to talk to.
“A lot of them are really shy and almost embarrassed because they have never had to do this before,” Tillinghast said.
The volunteers also say their work helps them keep in touch with reality and makes them step outside their ivory towers and circle of friends and realize there’s a lot of humanity going on that they need to be helping.
One of the volunteers was pushing a cart out for a woman who was driving a Mercedes and the woman said,” I bet you wonder why I’m driving this car. This is all I got in the divorce.”
“You never know what the situation is for people,” Smith said. “We try not to judge and just do what we can because if they’re here, it’s a very humbling experience, so they’re not going to come unless they really need it.”
The pantry has also helped the international students at Park University who weren’t able to get back to their homes when the virus began and when the food service at the school shut down.
They also direct people with pets to places where they can find pet food.
The pantry encourages those that want to help to donate money. As the virus has progressed they began discouraging people from bringing in goods since they had to be thoroughly sanitized.
“Actually, monetary donations go further because we have such a good deal buying from Harvester and we get great discounts,” Tillinghast said. “So it’s better than if we were buying it in the grocery store.”
The best way to donate money or to make an appointment to pick up food is to go to the pantry’s website at speacpantry.com or call 746-1057.
“Right now we all feel very fortunate that so many folks have been generous with us,” Hines said. “The first couple of months during the virus when everything was closed down we got a lot of donations and now that things are going back to normal - as normal as it’s going to be for a while - things have slowed down. I think people have thought we don’t need donations anymore but we still do. And at the end of the month when unemployment runs out we will see another surge.”
The volunteers are grateful for the generosity and help from community members and they are determined to keep food on the shelves for anyone who needs it. They believe it’s a pretty humbling experience for a family to have to come in and get food so they are determined to make it as comfortable as possible for them.