COVID-19 Impact: Food Bank Shuts Down Volunteers, Recruits Paid Staff

Shelter-in-place orders, business shutdown, and job loss have swamped Fort Worth nonprofits that get food to needy families. At the Tarrant Area Food Bank, which serves 13 counties and supplies 330 community pantries with food, donations of food have been disrupted by panicked shoppers rushing to grocery stores and wholesale clubs and hoarding food.

Julie Butner, CEO of the Food Bank, thinks the supply chain will “normalize.” She's more concerned with the disruption to the Food Bank's volunteer staffing model. Given coronavirus’ spread, the Food Bank decided March 20 to stop using its 50 daily volunteers who boxed up groceries for distribution the pantries. Instead, the Food Bank is shifting to paid staff in the warehouse to see the crisis through. “We’re trying to minimize the exposure to our own employees,” Butner says.

Fifteen staff members – laid-off employees of Fort Worth restaurateurs Jon Bonnell and Tim Love, who referred their people to the Food Bank – are scheduled to begin work in the warehouse Saturday. The Food Bank is working with AmeriCorps to recruit another 10 employees who will be paid by AmeriCorps.

The Food Bank is hunting for emergency funding to cover the personnel costs for the 15 employees, estimated at $15,000 per week. “That’s money that’s unbudgeted, unfunded,” Butner says of the extra personnel expense. That expense could run to $200,000 with a three-month layoff.

As part of the same emergency funding requests, the Food Bank also is seeking money to cover potential gaps in food supplies for children at home from closed schools, elderly shut-ins, and babies. Those include child-friendly foods, protein drinks, and infant formula.

Like many other nonprofits, the Food Bank had to cancel a major annual fundraiser, its Empty Bowls, because of the coronavirus. That typically brings in about $100,000. The Food Bank has launched a campaign aimed at major donors, starting with letters.

The Food Bank typically provides food in bulk to its pantries. As demand surged with coronavirus’ spread, the Food Bank began packing emergency boxes of food for families and distributing those through the pantries. It’s also set up drive-through distribution points with area school districts, distributing boxes containing three to four meals for a family of four to people who show up. Last Saturday, the Food Bank served 3,500 families through 16 mobile sites. UPDATE: Friday, the Food Bank and Fort Worth public schools announced five drive-through sites that will operate Saturday March 28.

This week, the Food Bank has seen an 80 percent increase in its distributions, Butner said. The previous week, distributions increased 35 percent.

“We’re anticipating this will continue as shelter-in-place continues and people lose their jobs,” Butner said. “We forecast it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

The Food Bank’s food partners have stepped in to help ensure a consistent supply, Butner said. The H-E-B grocery chain gave the Food Bank a financial gift the organization can use to buy certain foods that run short, Butner said. “They all stepped up,” Butner said of the Food Bank’s partners.

The Food Bank typically has received 25 percent of its food supply contributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the rest by private donors. Recently, as federal tariffs have crimped the U.S. farm economy, the Agriculture Department has stepped in with major purchases of products such as pork and distributed those to U.S. food banks. That’s meant 35 percent of Tarrant Area Food Bank food supplies now come from the USDA, Butner said.