Nate Youngblood, associate director of the Roseville-based nonprofit Every Meal (Fighting Child Hunger), was one of four speakers at a forum Feb. 24 on youth and hunger sponsored by Corpus Christi in Roseville. The Catholic Spirit Screenshot / Michael Pytleski
About 10 years ago, a school principal in northeast Minneapolis contacted a local church to discuss how some students hoarded food in the food line, especially on Fridays. School leaders knew they had a problem: Some students did not have enough food to eat. But, the school didn’t have the resources to address the issue. So, they asked the church to help find a solution.
“The church felt like that was something … reflective of their mission … and Every Meal was born,” said Nate Youngblood, Every Meal (Fighting Child Hunger)’s associate director. “Our mission is to fight child hunger through school partnerships.”
Youngblood was one of four speakers during a 90-minute livestream from Corpus Christi in Roseville Feb. 24 called “Young and Hungry: Youth Hunger in Minnesota and What We Can Do About It.” It was organized by the parish’s social justice committee. The forum explored how the problem of youth and hunger in Minnesota has been exacerbated by COVID-19.
Joining Youngblood were Mary McKeown, president of Keystone Community Services, a multi-service nonprofit based in St. Paul that serves about 35,000 people; Kelly Miller, director of the Department of Indian Work at Interfaith Action of Greater St. Paul; and Mary Kristjanson, a junior at Highland Park High School in St. Paul and president of its service club, The Good Club, which is focusing this year on distributing food for school families in need.
Based in Roseville, Every Meal (Fighting Child Hunger) is the answer to a logistics issue, not a supply issue, Youngblood said. “We know there’s plenty of food … in the United States and it’s just not getting to people who don’t have it.” His organization’s solution is providing backpacks with food purchased through donations that students in need can take home.
He said his organization wanted to find a way to better serve students, better understand their needs and partner with schools in the process.
Students who sign up for the program receive “delicious, nutritious” food that accommodates cultural preferences, Youngblood said. And during the pandemic, the organization has seen the need grow.
“Before COVID, Every Meal was serving about 325 locations, averaging about 23,000 meals a week, he said. “Once COVID hit, we’re … closer to 38,000 meals a week.”
But at the height of demand for food after schools closed and summer began, the number of backpack meals distributed reached about 100,000, he said.
Last March, schools across Minnesota moved to distance learning. In the fall, many public schools in the Twin Cities area continued distance learning, which meant their students didn’t have access to onsite free or reduced hot lunch programs, compounding the challenge, Youngblood said.
Corpus Christi parishioner Bill Brady, a volunteer board chairperson for Interfaith Action of Greater St. Paul, served as moderator of the panel discussion. He said about 70 people participated by video conference.
As the session got underway, Brady cited statistics from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., on the number of households struggling to put enough food on the table. He said that last spring, that statistic spiked to nearly three times what it was before the pandemic.
“And it pretty much stayed there over the summer,” Brady said. “And then it rose higher as we headed into the winter,” noting that’s a time when many people’s budgets are stretched, and families may need to choose between heat or food.
“But the story for children is even worse,” Brady said. “One analysis of census data estimates about 12 million children nationwide live in a household where there isn’t enough food,” he said, “and that is 10 times what it was at the end of 2019.”
While those are national numbers, Brady said Minnesota’s statistics tell “a similar story.”
“Before COVID, experts said one in 11 residents struggle to afford food. Now they think the number is more like one in eight, and for children, it may be as many as one in five,” Brady said. “That’s according to Second Harvest Heartland.”
McKeown said Keystone Community Services is one of the largest human service organizations in Ramsey County, which includes the City of St. Paul. It saw about a 13% increase in its services in 2020. “And that was really targeted to people that … had basic needs needing to be supported,” she said.
McKeown cited a January 2021 survey with results showing almost 10 million families in the U.S. with children experiencing food insecurity.
“We live in a country of abundance,” McKeown said. “So, this is not about not having food available. It’s about how that food gets out into the community.”
She said 31% of Black families, compared to 11% of white families and 27% of Latino families, are concerned about food insecurity.
Before the pandemic, McKeown said, Hunger Solutions, a statewide advocacy organization for hunger relief, found that the number of senior citizens visiting food shelves increased by 31% in 2020.
“We also did large food distributions … where we made them simple drive-up so people could come in anonymously, … and we saw a lot more seniors coming to those,” she said.
Young people are particularly affected by food insecurity, McKeown said, “because if their families don’t have enough food, it’s very difficult to go to school and do it virtually or figure out how to be a learner when your family is worried about whether or not they have enough food … for you. So that is … some of the … bigger, overarching issues that Keystone is trying to address in some very basic ways.”
Miller said that the mission of Interfaith Action is to mobilize diverse faith and spiritual communities to engage in work that supports “our neighbors’ stability and economic mobility.” One of the three focus areas at the Department of Indian Work is emergency services, offering clothing, food and shelter. And as one of the Minnesota Department of Health’s COVID-19 community coordinators, the department offers a COVID resource hotline for the American Indian community.
“We’re not as big as some of the other big food shelves because we focus on the American Indian community in the east metro,” Miller said. “Before COVID we were serving about 160 … households a month, and … once COVID hit, those numbers completely doubled.”
Miller said her organization serves youth in two programs. The first is a family-driven food shelf. She noted that the MDH reported that 31% of communities enrolled in the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, widely known as SNAP, are American Indian.
With distance learning in place, the organization needed to figure out how to deliver food to families that are homebound with children at home.
“And now they’re not working,” she said, describing complicating factors. “And now there’s a lockdown and they don’t want to take public transportation and bring their kids on the bus.”
Miller’s organization first partnered with Metro Mobility to deliver food to families. “We now have a van (so) we’re able to deliver food to our families,” she said, “which has been a huge help. We’re able to continue that, delivering food to them in our youth program.”
Last summer, her staff hosted a summer program online and partnered with its food shelf to deliver meal boxes to youth, she said.
Food mobility is also central to Kristjanson’s The Good Club. Students collect nonperishable food and money to buy perishable food for giveaways to students’ families in need. She said care is taken to make sure students and family members feel comfortable picking up food.
“There’s only been a couple students (from her club) at the actual distributions,” she said, noting she realizes some recipients feel a stigma about taking donated food.
“We’re trying to work on making people comfortable so that they can come back when they need to,” she said.
Kristjanson, a Corpus Christi parishioner, said her group’s mission is to provide opportunities for students to help people in need in their community, as well as to educate students about social justice issues “to create a more informed student body that is ready to make change.”
Youngblood said that before COVID, most kids found interaction, routine and a sense of normalcy in school. When the pandemic hit, that was all taken away.
“When you think about kids and how they’ve been affected over the last year,” he said, “the reality is it goes much deeper than do they have food or not. The reality is food is one of the most critical things for life and for a child to develop successfully, and to be able to engage in education. So, it’s incredibly critical.
“But … it’s easy to forget,” he said, “what a radical shift children have gone through in the entire state and … the whole country.”
The Social Justice Committee at Corpus Christi sponsors two forums each year: one during Lent and one during Advent.
Committee member Bill Brady said on a recent episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio program on Relevant Radio that the topic of youth hunger was chosen for the Feb. 24 forum because “we’ve heard so much from our friends in the nonprofit world about how the pandemic and the resulting lockdowns … have exacerbated food insecurity across the board and, in particular, among segments of the population that were already at risk: people of color, the indigenous communities and, of course, children and youth.”
Individuals who want to help are encouraged to donate food to local organizations with food shelves. Donations can also be made to the four organizations represented at the Feb. 24 forum via the Corpus Christi website, ccmn.org, by clicking on “Donate,” then “Other,” and entering “Youth Hunger Forum.” A $3,000 match will be added from an anonymous benefactor. The former parishioner, now deceased, had bequeathed funds to be used for human rights activities. The $3,000 will be divided equally among the four organizations.
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