What comes into your mind when you hear or read the words “food bank”? Is it a small closet full of dried goods in the back of someone’s house or in the basement of a church? What about a building that is essentially a small grocery store, with refrigeration and freezer capacity, except the food is handed out for free? Or what about an office suite attached to a nearly-100,000-square-foot warehouse that can move 22 million pounds of food in a year?
Perhaps some of you know this already, but only the last of these would be an accurate description of Food Bank of Central New York, the organization leading the fight against hunger in 11 counties in upstate New York and at which I have spent the last 10 weeks as an Field School Fellow. Food Bank of Central New York (hereafter FBCNY or “the food bank”) serves primarily as a distribution hub for hundreds of partnered food assistance programs across Cayuga, Chenango, Cortland, Herkimer, Jefferson, Lewis, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, Oswego, and St. Lawrence counties. In addition, the food bank addresses root causes of food insecurity through education and outreach programming and partnerships with non-traditional food bank partners, such as healthcare providers.
When I started my fellowship, I did not know any of this. I had heard of SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the largest federal anti-food-insecurity program — but I hadn’t heard of HPNAP, a New York state program providing funding and food resources, or WIC, the federal food assistance program for women, infants, and children, or TEFAP, a USDA program that donates agricultural surplus. I was not aware that there were large differences between a food pantry and a food bank; I had not been informed that the food bank procured most of its food through government grants, direct purchases, and retail grocery and wholesaler donations, not public-facing food drives; I had no idea that the food bank would have the operational capacity and demand-driven growth of a dynamic for-profit corporation. Nor did I know that FBCNY was scaling up its community outreach and engagement efforts to new heights, and that my project in Herkimer County would be intended as a forerunner to a great many others in the food bank’s future. In short, when I started this experience in early June, I had very little idea of the scope and complexity of a food bank’s mission and day-to-day efforts, nor how I could contribute to it.
My point in saying all this is not only that FBCNY, and food banks and food assistance networks in general, are large, efficient, rapidly-adapting organizations, nor that I am uniquely uninformed or that food assistance is a uniquely misunderstood topic. Rather, I wish to illustrate that an experience I never specifically intended to have until about seven months ago has taught me, an economics student interested in solving the challenges of poverty, that I was extremely ignorant of a fairly major component of anti-poverty efforts in both the region I now live in and the country as a whole. I do not like to think of myself as an especially ignorant or enlightened person. But that only implies that there may be many other people in my exact situation: people who are extremely interested in an important topic but may have a limited understanding of how it really works. I hope that my experience can encourage others to try out new ideas and projects, dive deep into the details of the issues they care about, and seek opportunities to learn far outside the classroom.
If there is one thing that I wish others to take away from my Summer Field School experience, it is to learn about the things you care about from as many different perspectives as you can, and to not be surprised when that process begets more questions than you started with. Those questions are a sign that you are thinking enough to begin to understand.
If there is a second thing I wish others to learn, it is that community outreach is really important for anyone trying to do good in a community. As almost everyone has some impulse to make the world better or at least preserve what is good, and people tend to live in communities, a stronger form of my claim is that everyone should try to learn more about the communities around them from other people’s perspectives. And while this post is long enough as it is, I would not be doing justice to my time at the food bank if I did not explain the project I spent the majority of my ten weeks working on, and how it connects to my belief in the value of learning about our communities.
My fellowship project sought to help “Mend the Meal Gap” in Herkimer County through a survey that would allow FBCNY to better understand people’s perceptions, awareness, and experiences with food insecurity and the food assistance network. To do so, I worked with food bank staff to create a 14-question survey, researched organizations and retailers in the county to partner with, and coordinated online efforts to share the survey with in-person site visits at six locations in the county. In the end, these efforts provided FBCNY with 172 responses to the survey, several new community contacts, and a variety of helpful commentaries about food insecurity and daily life in the communities we surveyed. At the same time, the surveying process provided me with a delightful new geographic understanding of Herkimer County, a newfound confidence in my ability to send professional but approachable emails and phone calls, and an appreciation for the helpfulness of food bank colleagues, librarians, superintendents, store managers, and the many other people who made in-person and digital survey work possible.
In addition, I acquired what can only be described as an intense recognition that these efforts were both highly valuable and only useful in the context of ongoing work to bring the food bank into closer collaboration with the people of the county. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake has its place, but knowledge of strengths and weaknesses in a region’s safety net paired with knowledge of potential partnerships in that area will only be put to good use if they can be used to preserve those strengths, mitigate those weaknesses, and create those partnerships and community ties. Unfortunately, I myself am leaving my position at the food bank the very day I write these words. Even as my colleagues and supervisors will conduct listening sessions, conversations, and ongoing dialogue with the communities they work with, and even as the food bank adapts its operations to meet expressed desires and understandings, I myself will not be able to put my new knowledge into use without finding a new avenue to do so.
Yet I can not help but feel hopeful and determined as a result of that realization. If I have the ability to make positive change in communities I care about—and anyone who has unique knowledge and experiences is likely in a position to do so—if I am not lacking in the ability to do good, but simply lack the context to do so, all that is left is finding or creating the right context for myself, which is something everyone is actively seeking, to some degree, at all times and stages of their life. So where my reflection leads me is that I must simply continue to live life, and as I do so, I will find a way to take my knowledge and make it useful by doing good.
Perhaps this is a lesson I already believed on some level, but my time as a Summer Field School Fellow at Food Bank of Central New York has made it much more available to my conscious self. For that fact, for all else I have learned this summer, and for the relationships I have built or helped to build, I will always be grateful.
To any readers who were seeking external-experience-driven accounts of my time as a field school fellow, I apologize, and encourage you to read the work of my fellow fellows, who did amazing work and probably communicated it in a more straightforward manner. But I hope you can appreciate and remember something from this reflection. If even one person is inspired in a new direction, or encouraged to continue their current one, then I will consider it a success.