There’s only so many plates of warm food Yannik McKie and Leon Harpe can give hungry children in their neighborhood using money from their Broadway Baptist Church’s donation basket.
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When they launched their first after-school feeding program in the Barton Chapel neighborhood in March, it took $3,000 to feed and get supplies for more than 30 children.
They took on the responsibility in January after the city ran out of funding to continue the South Augusta Community Development Corporation, which was a resource for needy families for decades.
As McKie and Harpe took over SACDC, they realized they needed more than church donations to keep up with the feeding programs, tutoring and outreach they hoped to give the community.
Many agencies like SACDC are working to feed communities out of pocket, without realizing several federal programs can help with funding. The Georgia Food Bank Association came to Augusta on Saturday with its No Kid Hungry Campaign to educate community agencies about federal reimbursement programs that are often left untapped even in critical times of need.
The campaign’s director, Karen Curry Davis, said there are possibly thousands of churches and feeding agencies across the state that are missing out on reimbursement because they aren’t aware of federal programs.
“Sometimes you’re so busy doing the work that you’re not accessing the resources that are out there to help you,” Curry Davis said.
For the outreach event in Augusta, Curry Davis said she contacted about 150 programs in the area.
It was also a chance for SACDC to promote its permanent after-school feeding program that starts Tuesday, but McKie said his group needs more collaboration from area agencies to reach more families.
“We can do certain things within our own program, but just imagine if three or four other churches were to provide support to a community along with us. You would literally begin to see things change overnight.”
As McKie sees the need for food assistance increase, Augusta agencies are working to meet the rising need.
Golden Harvest Food Bank, which supplies food for most of the feeding programs in the 30 counties around Augusta, has had an 11 percent increase in food distribution from last year.
While more people need help, Golden Harvest Executive Director Michael Firmin said the hundreds of programs that receive food from his bank have been able to meet much of the need.
Within the 30-county region, Golden Harvest distributed almost 4 million more pounds of food last year than the 10.4 million pounds it gave out in 2009.
“The average gift per person has declined but the amount of individual donations has risen,” Firmin said. “It’s the amazing generosity of people that lets us keep helping feed the hungry.”
Statewide the demand for food assistance has increased 35 percent to 40 percent each year since the peak of the recession in 2008, according to Georgia Food Bank Association Executive Director Danah Cornutt Craft.
Craft said the cause is a domino effect of unemployment and the rising cost of fuel, which raises food prices and makes struggling people spend more to put food on the table.
“We are seeing people who have never sought help before coming to the food banks, and the food banks are seeing people who were donors now become clients,” Cornutt Craft said. “It is a very real issue in Georgia because of the unemployment crisis.”
That’s why McKie said he hopes to reach more than the roughly 30 children who used his feeding program in March.
Since taking over the SACDC in January, McKie has launched youth mentoring programs, free GED classes, women support groups and the after-school feeding.
His group is looking for ways to fight youth problems such as drugs, violence and teen pregnancies while filling hungry bellies.
It’s a fight he said he can’t win alone.
“You can feed a child, and the stomach won’t be growling anymore, but they’ll have other issues,” he said. “We need people who can come along side us with programs to help fight those systematic issues.”
Food security is the USDA’s measure of lack of access to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members and an uncertain availably of nutritionally adequate foods. Food insecurity may reflect a household’s need to make trade-offs between housing or medical bills and buying food.
FOOD INSECURITY RATES
| Augusta | Georgia | |
| Amount of food insecure people | 43,100 | 1,693,710 |
| Food insecurity rate | 21.8 percent | 17.8 percent |
| Percent below the SNAP threshold* | 57 percent | 45 percent |
*Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program threshold of 130 percent poverty
Source: FeedingAmerica.org
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