LAKEPORT — Charitable organizations are scrambling to feed approximately 2,000 families in the middle of Lake County”s hungriest season.
The families were formerly fed from pantries run by the Lake County Community Action Agency (LCCAA), which closed it”s doors in February due to a failure to pay $340,000 in debt, as reported by the Lake County Record-Bee.
The abrupt closure of LCCAA left it”s clients in Clearlake and Lakeport with “a huge gap” in services offered, said Lorrie Gray, a founding member of the Lake County Hunger Task Force.
“When LCCAA went away in a hurry, which was overnight, it seems, their employees were told that they didn”t have a job and the doors were locked,” Gray said.
Representatives from Redwood Empire Food Bank, North Coast Opportunities and Catholic Charities spoke about the challenges of finding, transporting and dispensing 800,000 pounds of food that LCCAA would have provided Lake County residents at the July 12 Board of Supervisors (BOS) meeting.
“I can tell you that hunger is urgent, it”s right now, it”s today,” David Goodman, executive director of the Redwood Empire Food Bank said.
Catholic Charities, North Coast Opportunities, and many other faith-based organizations purchase their food from Redwood Empire Food Bank, a non-profit organization that distributed 12.5 million pounds of food in 2010. The Santa Rosa-based organization sent a mailing out to Lake County citizens requesting funds to help feed the county”s needy residents. The group spent $5,000 on the mailing and received $700 in donations, Goodman said.
Among the neediest residents are seniors, working poor, children and the homeless, Hedy Montoya, director of Lake County Programs for Catholic Charities said.
When Montoya came to Lake County in July 2002, she began distributing 20-pound boxes of food with Catholic Charities on the fourth Monday of every month.
The number of people that Catholic Charities served increased by several hundred after LCCAA closed.
“We”ve got more people hungry in Lake County than ever before that I know of,” she said.
Catholic Charities Lake County, which is in the process of moving its headquarters, hasn”t received funding from United Way in two years, and expects its FEMA grant to be $23,000, just 40 percent of what it was last year, Montoya said.
The current community action agency in Lake County is North Coast Opportunities (NCO), a private non-profit corporation that serves many counties in Northern California. Though NCO is eligible for federal block grants to purchase food, they do not yet have a building in Lake County from which to distribute it. NCO will be eligible to spend the $247,000 grant it received from the state when it establishes a consensus from Lake County citizens as to how the money should be spent, said Carolyn Welch, Chief Financial Officer for NCO.
North Coast Opportunities will establish this consensus through a Community Action Plan in August, Wes Winter, executive director of NCO said.
While NCO works to get facilities established, it”s important that local residents work together with food providers to combat the ever-present hunger issue, Goodman said.
“There”s no cavalry coming in,” he said. “There”s no national help coming in, there”s no state coming in. It”s a local issue.”
Ben Mullin is a Lake County native and an English/journalism student attending California State University, Chico. He will spend his summer as a contributor to the Record-Bee.
