It’s jarring to see the number of obese families arriving to collect their free food while driving late model Mercedes, BMW or Cadillac Escalades. Makes me question the “need”.
Family members in public education see the same pattern when “free” school supplies are distributed. Parents with $100 nails, $1000 weaves and driving new Cadillacs there to pick up “free” donated school supplies.
Some years ago, I helped start our church’s food pantry with the hope of helping the people who really needed it. It wasn’t intended to be a monthly resource for the same people over and over. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to see things going off the rails with the same people calling for appointments, always having six or more children, and a good number of people who showed up for appointments being obese, including the children. My desire to try and verify the people and whether they were already receiving government assistance was met with resistance.
Also, the other two who helped start the pantry didn’t have the same opinion as I did as to how we should stock. I didn’t want any junk foods at all while they protested ‘it was for the children’ who may not know how to cook and that they needed those granola bars, pop tarts, cereal bars, and other snacks. It wasn’t unusual for one of the others to show up with cupcakes, cookies, and even decorated sheet cakes to give out.
Then I noticed how many of the people picking up the food preferred to not even carry their food to their vehicles so not only were the workers packing and bagging the food, checking people in and out, but we were also having to carry food to the waiting vehicles. Helping an elderly person or someone who really needed it wasn’t a problem. But when I hustled some bags of food to a car and found two men sitting in there, smoking, I put the food down, rapped on the window, and then told the men that they needed to get out of the car and help carry their free food.
What finally made me personally walk away was the repeated so-called emergency calls from people claiming that they needed food for their children so we would make an exception to the number we were serving, add them to the list, and pack up food. If it rained, those ‘emergency cases’ were nearly always the ones who didn’t need the food badly enough to show up. After that, I decided I didn’t need the stress and stopped being involved at all. I have no regrets about walking away and not being involved now but I sure do wish I had done it sooner.
Peach
If you are on SSI (disability for people who don’t have enough work credits), you are allowed to own one vehicle of any value and still qualify for benefits. I know someone on SSI that got a couple of “windfalls” (insurance payout, inheritance) and he immediately uses it to buy a brand new vehicle, which he invariably wrecks (probably because he’s on opioids). That guy has spent more money on vehicles than he ever has on a place to live.
Exactly. We volunteered once a month to feed the homeless at my friend’s Temple. When I noticed that most of them had better cell phones and shoes than we did, I opted out.
I’m as cynical as the next guy, too. If you build it (or give it away for free) they will come!
It’s different in my rural area. We don’t have a bunch of Welfare Queens in Caddies - though you only need to go one county over and they are abundant. *Rolleyes*
The people that use my Food Pantry are everyday folk - retired widowed farmers, disabled people, single Moms with little kids, and a few of the crazies you can see roaming the Main Drag and mumbling to themselves at any given time. ;)
My SIL volunteers at one of the largest food pantry operations in the state - it’s not unusual for them to put together a THOUSAND Thanksgiving Dinners in November...and there are still people left wanting.