After food pantry closes in Talent, community agency works on next steps

A food pantry located in the center of Talent, Oregon, was forced to close earlier this year. It was located in Talent’s old Town Hall and was easily accessible to residents. A fire broke out at the location and organizers of the pantry are working on finding a new spot. ACCESS, the agency behind the service, operates mobile pantries throughout Jackson County. We check in on what’s next for Talent with Marcee Champion, the food programs director for ACCESS.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. A food pantry in the center of Talent had to close earlier this year. Then, last month, the mobile pantry that had been serving as a kind of stopgap in the same basic location also had to shut down. Marcee Champion is a food programs director for ACCESS; the social services agency runs a whole network of food pantries in Jackson County. She joins us now with an update. Marcee, welcome to the show.

Marcee Champion: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Miller: Can you describe the setup that you’d had at the old Town Hall?

Champion: Yeah. So we had been at that location for quite a while. We had food stored in the basement, and then the volunteers would bring it upstairs to the big meeting room and run the pantry. We actually did know we were going to need to vacate that location. We just thought we’d have more time. We were supposed to happen until like October of next year, but that time frame sped up when the fire happened in the basement of that building.

Miller: How much have officials been able to say about the fire there?

Champion: I don’t have the official report, but my understanding is that there was some sort of a device sitting on a wooden table. No one was there, but it was either battery-operated, or for some reason, it sort of combusted. Also, most of the damage was actually smoke damage. The fire itself was pretty small, but there was extensive smoke damage.

Miller: As I mentioned, after that, my understanding is you’d been able to operate a mobile food pantry in the parking lot for a few months. Why did you have to stop that last month?

Champion: So that was the parking lot of that building, and they were gonna be doing remediation work and needed the parking lot for the vehicles and the equipment that we were gonna be coming in to work on that building.

Miller: So what options do you have right now for serving people in the center of Talent?

Champion: In the center of Talent, right now, we don’t currently have an option; but we’ve been working with the city, and we are planning to start another mobile pantry location just a stone’s throw from where that other parking lot was. And we’re expecting to start that sometime in September.

Miller: How important is that? I mean, my understanding is that you do operate 30-something different food pantries on different days all around a pretty large county, geographically, in Jackson County – including one, at least some days, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s (OSF) sort of technical location in Talent. How important, though, is it to be able to do it in the center of town?

Champion: Yeah, we do operate the one at OSF twice a month, but having it in the center of town allows people who don’t have transportation or easy ways to get places to walk. And we do have a good portion of people who are able to just walk from their residences. There’s a community that’s being housed that were fire-affected from the fires back in 2020, and it’s not that far from where they are. So while there are locations, including the one at OSF, there’s another location about four miles from there in Phoenix, and another about five miles a little more than that in Ashland. But, if you don’t have a vehicle, that can be tricky to get to.

Miller: How common is that? How common is it for transportation to be another barrier for the people who are already dealing with food insecurity?

Champion: It obviously depends kind of where the pantry is located. So we do have pantries that do see more people on foot, either because they don’t have transportation or they’re houseless. I haven’t run the numbers for Talent, but the pantry manager there does say that there’s a good portion, maybe not quite a third, who will walk there. They may have transportation, but it might just be cheaper and easier for them to walk there.

Miller: Have you seen an uptick in visits to some of those other pantries that you mentioned, since either the brick-and-mortar – the old Town Hall site – or the mobile version in the nearby parking lot were shut down? Did you see more people going to the other locations?

Champion: Interestingly, we have a location in Ashland, but there’s another food bank in Ashland, and I just met with their executive director last week on an unrelated thing. She did mention they have seen an uptick for sure. So we are seeing people sort of funneled to other pantries. But again, a location that’s within easy accessibility – we’re always wanting to make that possible for people.

Miller: How much of a connection is there between the food insecurity that you’re responding to now and the devastating fire, the Almeda Fire, that hit especially Talent and Phoenix almost exactly four years ago?

Champion: There is definitely a connection. Like I mentioned, there is a community that sprang up to help house people after those fires. And that is a community that we would typically come to our food pantries. Our food pantries – the Oregon guideline for that is that you can be at 300% of the poverty line. We serve a lot of people, and we’re there for anybody that needs it and meets the qualification.

Miller: What does that mean? Most people probably listening now don’t think about percentage of above or below the poverty line. Can you give us a sense for what the eligibility requirements mean in terms of average household size or household income?

Champion: Yeah. So for a family of four, for example, you can make $7,800 a month and qualify to come to one of our pantries.

Miller: How aware do you think people are of the support that is technically available to them?

Champion: I think there’s a pretty good awareness in Jackson County. ACCESS, which is the Community Action Agency for the county, has been around since 1976, and we’re known in large part because of the food bank. So I think there is a lot of awareness. In terms of people recognizing that they may be eligible, I’m always trying to get that message out, because somebody may need help one month or maybe just a few months a year. And I definitely want people to recognize that they can come find out if they’re eligible, and they may be surprised at what that eligibility requirement is

Miller: On your website, you do have the eligibility requirements as well as pantry days and locations in both English and in Spanish. How else do you spread the word about your services to non-English speakers?

Champion: All of our materials are available in both English and Spanish, and we have staff, of course, who speak Spanish. One of our locations is at Unete, which is a local farm worker type organization. I know that they have a good network in the community. We’re also connected to other organizations in the community that are sort of geared towards that Hispanic population.

Miller: The fires that we talked about earlier – the terrible Almeda Fire in particular – it came in the first year of COVID. How did the pandemic affect the number of people who were seeking out food support?

Champion: Well, we definitely did see an uptick for sure at that time. And one of the interesting things about being in food banking is to see how much what happens, at a local level, of course, but state and even national level can affect pantry visits. So, for example, if food stamp benefits go down, we see an increase at pantries. During COVID, we saw during those years like a lot of ups and downs in terms of visits. But once they cut off the extra benefits, for example, like we braced ourselves for an uptick in pantry visits at that time.

Miller: What about volunteers? How much do you rely on volunteers to provide the services that you’re providing?

Champion: We absolutely could not do it without them. All of our pantries are run by volunteers – except our mobile pantry does have two paid staff because it’s a huge truck, and we have to make sure that gets out there and is supported. All of the other pantries are volunteer-run, from the pantry manager on down. So the Talent crew, for example, is a wonderful volunteer group, and they were devastated by having to shut the pantry down after the fire in April. And they’re just eager to get back to helping run a pantry again.

Miller: Marcee, thanks very much.

Champion: Thank you.

Miller: Marcee Champion is the food programs director for ACCESS; that’s a Community Access Agency in Jackson County.

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