Margaret Thompson is fighting from the basement.
“It’s an uphill fight to the bottom,” she said. “That's why I'm here, with minimum wage. I haven't made minimum wage since 1968.”
At 74, Thompson has gone back to work. Through Goodwill Industries she is also a volunteer at HOPE in Lancaster, one of the county’s two main food pantries.
Factoring in the money she gets from Social Security, Thompson makes a little too much overall to qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). She is one of the many Americans occupying the middle ground where they are too poor to afford to buy food and pay all the bills, but too wealthy to qualify for public assistance funds.
It's residents like Thompson that HOPE is trying so hard to serve. The agency provides food and also help with rent and utilities. But it has been straining under the weight of post-Covid realities that have left more families struggling to make ends meet.
“We were seeing on average about five financial clients a day,” said Susan Dolphin, executive director of HOPE, about the volume that came through the agency’s doors a few years ago. “We're up to some days seeing 20. And it went from five to 20 in a matter of a week.”
Once Covid-era protections against eviction, and financial bumps from federal checks, subsided, the slow stream of Lancaster residents in need of help to get through their lives turned into a river that has yet to subside, Dolphin said.
Add to that, the continuing upswing in home prices and rents in Lancaster County – a fast-growing exurb in the Charlotte metro market – as well as a major slow-down in the amount of food HOPE receives from supermarkets, and Lancaster’s food insecurity troubles become more acute.
While rents have leveled off in Lancaster since last summer, and while they are among the least-expensive median rents in the Charlotte metro statistical area, a one-bedroom apartment in 2020 rented for an average of $600 per month, according to RentData. It now runs for almost $1,000 per month.
Meanwhile, the median price to buy a home in Lancaster City in February, according to SC Realtors, was $319,000. In February of 2022, it was $290,000. At the beginning of 2020, it was $137,500.
Swapping TEFAP
One way HOPE is looking to serve residents better is by taking over The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) from the county’s other main food pantry, Christian Services.
While food for TEFAP is provided through Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina, additional food comes to HOPE from grocery stores. Since the pandemic, however, stores are dropping off a lot less food, typically because grocers don’t have the same profit margins they once had, and so not as much product to deliver.
“We used to have such an abundance that we could be very picky,” Dolphin said. “We're just not getting as much [now]. And so, while we're still being very picky, both sides are not getting what we used to get. There might have been a day where we were getting about 225 pounds of food from one grocery store and now we might be getting 50 pounds or 65 pounds. Maybe 100 pounds.”
And, she said, it’s not easy to find ways to stretch less food over more families – as many as 900 in a given month.
The latest figures – from 2022 – by Feeding America, found that 11,400 residents of Lancaster County were food insecure, which translates to about 12% of the population. That’s a percentage point lower than South Carolina overall, on average.
But this makes TEFAP– a federal food program aimed at supplementing the diets of people earning low incomes – a vital link to nutrition in Lancaster.
HOPE originally administered the program, but Christian Services assumed it for the past several years. Now, HOPE will take it over again.
These two nonprofits have worked in tandem for years, offering food pickup days among their other services. But HOPE and Christian Services are very different entities in some key ways.
Whereas HOPE provides a suite of assistance services, including case management for struggling families, Christian Services operates more like a business. The agency has a bowling alley and a thrift store that keep it funded, unlike HOPE, which relies heavily on grants and donations.
Certain federal regulations require recipients to qualify to receive TEFAP, which, said Christian Services’ Executive Director Eric Kramer, made it hard for his agency to be able to navigate food distributions.
But because HOPE does case management – helping workers there identify and look for solutions to stress points in a family’s situation – Kramer said it makes more sense for HOPE to take TEFAP back.
The two agencies agreed to the arrangement on March 3. The hope, Dolphin said, is that by seeing families who are likely struggling with more than just food affordability, HOPE might be able to – literally – take at least that expense off their plates.
“If there's any way that we can make that dent in what people wouldn't have to pay for food so that they can pay for other things,” she said, “that will be very helpful to our community.”
