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Feeding South Dakotans During A Pandemic

Distribution centers for Feeding South Dakota remain open and are distributing food to partners and programs across the state. They are working with school districts, after school programs and other organizations regarding the distribution of meals to children, families, seniors and others who need them. Times are especially difficult for an organization like this and here to talk about this is Matt Gassen, he's the CEO of Feeding South Dakota.

And then during part two of this segment, we continue the conversation around food insecurity with Tamara Jerke-Liesinger, executive director of The Banquet.

Lori Walsh: Welcome to In the Moment. I'm Lori Walsh. Distribution centers for Feeding South Dakota remain open and they are distributing food partners and programs across the state. Times are especially difficult for an organization like this and the people they serve. Here to talk with us is Matt Gassen, he's CEO of Feeding South Dakota. Matt, thanks for making time for us today.

Matt Gassen: You're welcome. Lori and thanks for having me on.

Lori Walsh: Tell us what your operations and distribution centers are like across the state. How many people do you serve and what communities?

Matt Gassen: Well, Feeding South Dakota has three distribution center locations, one in Sioux Falls, one in Pierre and one in Rapid City. And from those three locations, Lori, we're distributing food to all 66 counties in South Dakota in an effort to credit meet the hunger needs in their communities in those counties all across our state.

Lori Walsh: Was coronavirus and an increased demand part of your planning process? How long have you been thinking about how things might change?

Matt Gassen: Well, I think to say that it was part of our planning process prior to a month ago would be a lie. I don't know that anybody really saw this one coming. But for us, it's the reality here and it's our new reality for this organization in a way that we act and we distribute food. So, we are really changing our model from a lot of the basic programs that we had been operating up to this point, to really converting everything over to just preparing emergency food boxes that we can distribute directly out to individuals and families and programs that we're serving as well.

Lori Walsh: What sort of challenges and how are you addressing those challenges regarding keeping your volunteers safe, keeping staff safe and keeping your clients, your customers, the people you serve, say from from making the problem worse, really?

Matt Gassen: A lot of that, Lori, is based on the emergency box method of distributing food, where we just hand people an individual box of a food or boxes of food directly to the individual maybe. We're going to be doing a lot more drive by or drive-through distributions, where we then limit that social interaction between multiple people so that it's just a box being either handed to an individual or put it in an individual's car or maybe an individual comes by and picks the box off the pallet to take home with them, so that we can. Maintain those distances. Internally, that takes a lot of people to make those boxes happen. And so volunteers have historically always been the key to making that possible and it still is today.

And with the new announcement of trying to keep the groups to sizes of 10 or less is going to be a real challenge for us. And so we have been all along trying to minimize the size of our volunteer groups, keeping them right around 20 and unfortunately, I think we're still going to have to go that way, but we're looking at how we can create some distance. So maybe we run two packing lines instead of one, where we can put 10 people in one part of the facility and 10 people in the other part of the facility, so we create some of that distance because it's unfortunate, this being the norm, that we're going to need to be creating boxes for the near future and so we've got to keep this model going.

Lori Walsh: I'm just humbled by the efforts that people are doing. When the volunteers will be healthy and have no symptoms, but they're willing to do that extra planning and extra distancing just to keep vulnerable people from spreading this virus, which might not show ... You might have it, you might not know. So that's just remarkable, what people are willing to do and how hard they're willing to work.

Matt Gassen: I was just going to say at the end of the day, the volunteers are going to be the heroes of this whole event.

Lori Walsh: Are you getting more people who are wanting to volunteer, people who are at home without symptoms and are just ready to put their backs to use for somebody?

Matt Gassen: Yeah, we really are. Volunteers have just been stepping up. The faith based community has been tremendous and rallying their people from their churches and congregations to help us. A lot of it's, we're using them to do the external distribution piece for us, so that we can then keep our staff inside, where we can create our greatest amount of efficiencies and probably have the best chance of keeping our staff healthy too, which is vitally important because we operate really, really lean with staff and so when one or two individuals would maybe go down, it could create some real challenges for us. So the best we can keep our staff in our facilities, we can be more efficient and we can keep them healthier. And that's going to help us in this work in the long run.

Lori Walsh: Tell me about the need for resources, the need for extra funds or extra supplies. That must be a critical at some point in the future, if it's not critical already.

Matt Gassen: Right. Well right now, we came into this, fortunately with a pretty good inventory in our facilities of donated and purchased product. The big challenge is going to be as we're doing these emergency boxes, we're going to run through our inventory probably fairly quickly. I think in a week or so, we're going to have a better idea of how long our inventory is going to hold up. But at some point in time, we've got to procure more food, which I have a full time procurement person doing that right now, trying to source it wherever we can find it. So there's going to be some costs incurred with that from greater distances to have to pay for transportation, get product hauled to that part where if we can't find donated food, we're going to try to have to buy some purchased foods.

So there'll be a far greater cost in that food that we have to purchase, versus that, that we can procure through the donation channels. But at the end of the day, we've got to just keep up with the demand and we got to try to stay ahead of the curve because it's going to be really difficult for us to play catch up if we don't stay on top of having the boxes built, so that we can meet the needs in communities across the state, then it would be really, really hard for us to catch up.

Lori Walsh: Has panic buying by regular citizens impacted your supply chain at all? Do you anticipate that it will or do you feel like the president said that those supply chains are pretty solid and are going to hold up okay?

Matt Gassen: Well, I think at the local level, Lori, we might be seeing just a little bit. We operate a pretty significant, what we call retail store pickup program, where we have trucks that go to the retail grocery stores, box stores, and virtually any store that has a grocery department in it. And we're picking product from them that they're pulling off their shelf because it's getting close to code or whatever. And now that the panic buying is going on, they're selling virtually everything in their store. So there's a little less of that product being donated on a day to day basis. But we'll monitor that nationally. We're probably a little more concerned than even locally, what kind of product is going to be available through those manufacturer donations, those large businesses, the General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft, ConAgra, the Tysons, those corporations that donate into the Feeding America network of food banks, which we're a part of. Will those supplies hold up?

Lori Walsh: Another good lesson for listeners today, that panic buying is potentially an impact not only for your neighbor, but for people across the state who have no access to food or even housing. Matt Gassen, CEO of Feeding South Dakota. Thank you so much for being here with us. We really appreciate your time.

Matt Gassen: Well, thank you Lori and thank you for keeping this issue and the impact of this issue in the forefront of your listeners and we're so grateful to all of you for all that you do for us.

Lori Walsh: Thank you. We'll continue to come back anytime to keep people posted. We're talking now about how concerns about Coronavirus in South Dakota are impacting people with income insecurity, food insecurity, or without homes. Tamera Jerke-Liesinger is the Executive of The Banquet in Sioux Falls. She joins us on the phone now as well. Tamera, thanks for making time for us. We appreciate it.

Tamera J.L.: Thank you for having me.

Lori Walsh: Tell us what some of the Coronavirus challenges you are facing early on as Minnehaha County has five confirmed cases right now. The numbers are fairly low at this point, but the future is pretty clear. Tell me what some of those early challenges are and how you're facing them.

Tamera J.L.: Yeah. This has really impacted how The Banquet gets food to people in need in Sioux Falls/ starting on Friday afternoon, we had to implement a to-goal meal policy, so starting then and moving forward until further notice, we are, instead of welcoming people into our buildings and serving them a warm, nutritious meal, we are now meeting them at the door with a to-go box, still with a hot meal in it, but not being able to allow them in and give them the opportunity to sit down and eat that meal in our buildings.

Lori Walsh: How many people might you serve for a meal? Can you give us any kind of estimates on how many people this might impact on a daily basis at The Banquet so far on a regular day?

Tamera J.L.: Right. Typically, in normal times, The Banquet, we usually are looking at serving at our main location, breakfast anywhere from 150 to 200 people every day. On an evening meal at our main location, we're serving 350 to 500 people. And so this has impacted us because we're having a hard time making people aware that we're still serving, but it's a to-go meal. So right now our number has dropped off, which leads us to believe that people who need our food, our assistance aren't coming. So it's getting the word out to them of how we're still providing our services. We're just doing it in a different way. So I'm anticipating that once people are familiar with this new process, our numbers will go back up. And then depending on how long it goes on, we're planning to address any additional needs that we might see.

Lori Walsh: Give me an idea of the logistics of this because people might, are they outside, standing fairly far apart from each other and snow might be coming. What are some of the challenges of the logistics?

Tamera J.L.: Right. The logistics of coordinating a line outside, because we're used to having a waiting area inside our buildings for people to wait. So yeah, it's making sure that we're coordinating and can keep people in that line. And then our biggest challenge right now is the people who actually are preparing and serving the meals. All of our meals at The Banquet are prepared by, paid for and served by volunteer groups. So as a social distancing is being encouraged, as would make sense, many of our volunteer groups are canceling for the time being. And so that we've had to get very creative about how we get a few volunteers in here a couple of times a day to prepare a meal for two to 300 people. So, that's where the logistics are getting a little ... We have to get a little bit more creative with that.

Lori Walsh: Yeah. And for you, has the panic buying in the city of Sioux Falls affected your supply chain at all? Do you anticipate there being problems there? Have you seen them so far?

Tamera J.L.: So far we are not seeing any issues, but talking to our retailers and whatnot, know that there's a potential in the future. I heard a little bit of Matt's last little, his [inaudible 00:12:32] and we are also seeing that too. A lot of the stores and restaurants and whatnot, or excuse me, not restaurants. But stores that typically are giving us donated goods, we're not seeing as much of that right now. So at this point, it's not very detrimental to us, but it's always a potential and we know it's in our radar that we might need to address it.

Lori Walsh: You mentioned other needs, anticipating other needs in the coming days. What can you tell me about some of the conversations you've had about meeting some of those needs? What do you anticipate might happen for this community in Sioux Falls, a community of people who are food insecure or housing insecure, maybe don't have a place to rest their head at night?

Tamera J.L.: Right. Well, we've worked very closely with the other agencies close in our proximity that are assisting some of the same people that we are assisting and every day it's a new evaluation of where we add, what safety precautions do we put in place, how do we make sure that we're keeping people as safe as possible. And also too, when somebody identifies maybe with a symptom, we don't want to turn them away. I mean, just because somebody has a symptom and may have this virus doesn't mean that they don't need to be fed. And so how do we go about safely getting food to them as well?

Lori Walsh: Well, and likewise, I mean, many of us are being told that if we do have symptoms, stay home, well someone might not have a home, but to take care of yourself at home, it's awfully difficult to take care of yourself when you're sick, if you don't have even any nutrition to get into you. Many of these people would not have health insurance, although many would. They might be working families with health insurance and are just food insecure. You just are going to see a ton of different life stories pasS before you every day.

Tamera J.L.: Right, and that's where we anticipate that perhaps we could be serving even more people if, like you're talking about, a working-poor family that all of a sudden maybe their income becomes restricted because their job is they work in a restaurant and the restaurant shut down for a brief period of time. Well people who might not normally have used The Banquet's services might be looking to The Banquet services then. So those are things that were again, just constantly in our minds, knowing that there's a potential to have to plan for that.

Lori Walsh: It seems like recently we were talking about increase in services after the government shutdown, as people didn't have paychecks go on for a certain period of time. Lots ahead to plan for. Any messages to people who want to help who are listening right now and saying, I'm home with the kids. I'm working from home. I can take some time, or I'm out of work, I can volunteer. Where should people reach out if they think they could be of service?

Tamera J.L.: Right. We would love to talk to people about coming and volunteering with us. They can just call us at (605) 335-7066. Jump on our website and we would love to have people come in and help us through this rather challenging time.

Lori Walsh: Tamera Jerke-Liesinger is the Executive Director of The Banquet in Sioux Falls. Tamera, keep us posted. Come back on any time with any needs that you have and we'll get the word out to people. We appreciate it.

Tamera J.L.: Thanks so much for having me.

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