DE PERE, Wis. — The staff and volunteers at De Pere Christian Outreach have seen more people use their pantry offerings the past few months.
“We seen our numbers more than double,” said operations manager Amy Murphy. "Each week, seeing rouglyh 50 to 55 [households] and it keeps going up. Some of our call-ins are actually people who don’t even have a home, who are homeless. We’re seeing an increase in people who don’t have an actual zip code that they live in. It’s become more of an ongoing stress and a need in our community.”
The end of emergency COVID food benefits in late winter and inflation are some of the factors driving the numbers up.
“Each week we’ll have at least one or two new users to our food panty. Inflation has definitely increased,” Murphy said. “When you go to a grocery store and you see Miracle Whip for $6 and up, or just your general non-perishable food, its definitely impacted our families abilities to care for them.”
To help people find culturally-inclusive foods and food services, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension Brown County launched a new map to help people find food and food services in northeast Wisconsin. It includes things such as food pantries, electronic benefit transfer locations, meal programs and community gardens.
“We collect food pantry statistics and in the last couple of months we have seen an increase in the number of households using food pantries,” said Clarice Martell, one of the extension staff members who worked on the map project. “We hope that this map can make it easier for food insecure households to locate food resources near to them.”
The ultimate goal is to bring awareness to available services.
“Then also see where there is opportunities and gaps for people who are maybe unable to access those existing resources,” Martell said.
Murphy said she doesn’t expect recent upward trends to slow anytime soon; she said there could actually be an increase.
“Food pantries are there to help people, whether it be non-perishable items or toiletries and milk and cheese or anything refrigerated, we’re there for people to use,” she said.