Food Deliveries Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Appalachian Program Feeds Families As The Pandemic Economy Places More In Need

It’s a sweltering hot Monday in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the kitchen at Community Agricultural Nutritional Enterprises, or CANE, is buzzing with activity.

In an industrial kitchen that was once a high school cafeteria, Brandon Fleming is chopping onions and sliding them into a massive aluminum tray of beans. Once the beans are in the oven, Fleming mops his brow and heads outside to the parking lot, where a small army of teenagers is loading bags and boxes of groceries into the trunks of waiting cars.

“We have forecasted that tomorrow we will hand out our 100,000th meal,” Fleming said as he surveyed the scene.

It’s quite a feat to have accomplished in just three weeks, even more so when you consider that Letcher County, of which Whitesburg is the county seat, is home to just 21,500 people.

The county sits along the Kentucky-Virginia border, in the heart of Appalachian coal country. Since the Louisville and Nashville Railroad laid tracks into the region in 1912, trainfuls and later truckfuls of black gold were taken from these mountains, keeping the lights on across an industrializing America while coal country itself was left behind.

You might still see a coal miner in coal-smudged reflective work pants stopping by the Double Kwik for a cup of coffee, and you’ll still find “Friends of Coal” bumper stickers and long-idled coal tipples as you drive these winding roads. But Letcher County can’t be coal country much longer.

Will it rely on tourism next? Agriculture? Industry? No one knows for sure.

But now there’s a pandemic, and those existential questions have been sidelined, it seems, by a more urgent, more solvable problem: getting bread, milk and broccoli to kitchen tables when many are going without.

Growing Agriculture in Appalachia

Partly because of extraction, and partly because of the miles of mountain roads separating the region from anywhere else, Letcher County ranks among the lowest counties in the nation on measures like per-capita income, health conditions like diabetes and COPD, and unemployment.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment in Letcher County was at 12 percent, wellabove the national average. Now that number is likely about 20 percent.

About 30 percent of Letcher County children didn’t have adequate food, even before the pandemic hit; now, the nonprofit Feeding America has found that eastern Kentucky has some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the nation.

SFSP staff and volunteers prepare for residents to arrive.

The statistics are part of what inspired Valerie Horn in 2009 to begin a shared garden in the community of Cowan, as part of the Grow Appalachia program with nearby Berea College. She wanted to connect families in her community to fresh fruits and vegetables, but also to a history of agriculture that predates coal.

“Last year, Grow Appalachia harvested over 250,000 pounds of fresh produce,” Horn says. “At one point a few years back, I was talking to my brother, and I was really excited that we were over 50,000 pounds at the time. My brother is a very practical person, he knows how much work it is to get that much out of a garden. So he goes, ‘Harrumph. That’s as much as a coal truck.’ Since then, I have enjoyed that image, of a coal truck full of fresh produce.”

The CANE community kitchen emerged from the Grow Appalachia garden as a place for farmers to produce value-added goods like jams and pickles, and for people of all backgrounds to sit together and enjoy a free meal prepared with local foods.

Now it’s the staging ground for a massive operation getting free food to 2,400 children and 1,000 families, from McRoberts on one end of the county to Gordon, an hour away, on the other.

“Without really understanding how big this project was, we decided to do it, and to take that challenge,” Horn says.

The program is funded by the USDA’s Summer Food Service Program, which is designed to provide healthy meals to children in low-income families when school is out for the summer. In normal years, children gather in a central location to share a sit-down meal, but because of the pandemic, the USDA has permitted program sponsors instead to provide meal kits to eligible families.

“What a meal kit means is, it’s ingredients for breakfasts for seven days and lunches for seven days,” Horn says. “My understanding is that it lasts until the pandemic is over; my latest notice is that we’re good through August 31.”

Downtown Whitesburg, Kentucky as seen from the CANE Kitchen.

Delivering with Community Help

The program is a massive logistical lift for Horn, Fleming and a small crew of other leaders.

Many in Letcher County lack access to internet service, so some needy children don’t get registered, and some families have to be called to make sure they make their pickup. A fair share of Letcher County children live with grandparents or other family members, meaning elderly people who are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus are often the ones swinging through the pickup lines behind the CANE kitchen.

Transportation is another challenge. Horn throws up her hands, imagining the hassle of getting a baby, a toddler and a first-grader ready and into the car, then navigating miles of treacherous mountain roads to the county seat.

That’s why Horn has partnered with volunteer fire departments across the county, and it’s why a jovial man named Allen Cornett picks up 22 boxes of food from the Whitesburg community kitchen. He loads them into the back of an ambulance and drives them 30 minutes to the Gordon Volunteer Fire Department.

Everybody calls him Red Allen, or just Red.

“I used to be red-headed, but I’m not now,” Cornett says with a laugh, lifting a baseball cap to reveal long gray hair.

“Red Allen” Cornett supervises meal kit distribution at the Gordon Volunteer Fire Department.
Credit Sydney Boles / Ohio Valley ReSource

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Cornett is new to food distribution. He doesn’t really know what the CANE Kitchen is, or how this free food got there. But he and his wife spend the morning calling 22 families in the Gordon area to make sure they knew it was pick-up day.

“We’re volunteering to help out, do this for the summer months, plus I guess with this virus-19 going around, too,” Cornett says.

Horn says she knew that CANE would need to partner with people like Cornett and groups like the Gordon Volunteer Fire Department. Like many families around here, seven generations of Horn’s family have lived in the same holler, passing food from one front porch to the next.

Not too long ago, when Horn’s mother started going to the Whitesburg high school, she had only been to the county seat three times in her life. Now, Horn might make the same trip three times a day. But the cognitive distance remains.

“For her, in the holler that she grew up in, in Scuttle Hole Gap, coming to Whitesburg was a big deal, and there was a divide between the communities and the county seat of Whitesburg. So I would think that sometimes, families would just be more comfortable if it’s their neighbor that they know that is distributing the milk and the box of food.”

Local teens help out distributing free meal kits to low-income families.

Still, about half of the families registered for the program choose to pick up their groceries in Whitesburg, at the old city high school given new life as a community gathering place.

A declining population and school consolidation left this great hulking building empty; local agriculture, free concerts and farm-to-table food for anyone who wants it brought the building back to life.

“It’s like the Velveteen Rabbit,” Horn says. “Every time we use the space, it gets a little more real.”

This story was produced with America Amplified, a public media initiative funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. America Amplified is using community engagement to inform and strengthen local, regional and national journalism.

LISTEN: How Appalachia's Front Porches Are Connecting People During The Coronavirus Pandemic

The front porch is well known across much of Appalachia as a gathering place for conversation and sharing. During the coronavirus, those front porches have become a lifeline, for some — in more ways than one.

For YES! Magazine, in partnership with 100 Days in Appalachia, reporter Alison Stine explored how the ethos of the front porch as a connection point is being used to help keep students and families fed during the COVID-19 pandemic. She spoke with West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter Brittany Patterson. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation.

***Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Stine: I’ve lived in Appalachian Ohio for many, many years. My son was born here, and when he was a newborn, [was when] I think I first became aware of the particular spirit and ingenuity and generosity of my neighbors. Food started appearing on our porch, homemade food for myself and my son. And people would leave hand-me-downs on our porch. And so, as my son has grown older, and I’ve lived for a very long time in the town where I live, you know, we started to give back as well. And I saw that happening in the pandemic, especially now when maybe you can’t go up to somebody’s door and talk to them. People have been leaving notes on porches, or books on porches, disinfected board games, on porches, masks. And so, with YES! Magazine, we wanted to write a story about how that might be formalized. That idea leaving things for other people on the porch. Is that happening on a more formalized manner? Is that happening in larger local networks like the schools and local governments?

Patterson: One thing that this story addresses is the food insecurity that has been really brought to the forefront by this coronavirus pandemic. How is this idea of a front porch network helping get food to children and families?

Stine: What we see happening throughout the region, but I think also now nationally, is food is being delivered to school children through their bus routes. We talked about in the story that the buses aren’t sitting empty, you know, parked in the bus garages, the buses are still running and the drivers are still driving. But instead of taking kids to school and to home, they’re taking meals to children. They already had those routes established, and schools already knew who was in need. So, school buses had been delivering initially, I think they were delivering food daily, but now in many places, including places in West Virginia and Ohio, they’re delivering food bags once a week.

Patterson: They’re also delivering other things that students might need during this time. Tell us a little bit about that.

Stine: Yeah, some school districts have started delivering homework even. The idea was not that students would turn in the homework and have it be graded. But just this is a way not to fall behind, which is really important for our region, because we have some rural areas, some remote areas, not everyone has internet at home. There was one school district in Kanawha County, West Virginia, that the teachers would ride on the bus and they ran out and delivered the homework. So, the students got to see that teachers face, which was really important, just to have that sense of familiarity.

Patterson: You write in the piece that, “Appalachians are used to rising to the challenge of taking care of their own communities.” And so they were quickly able to put together these less formal means of delivering aid and helping one another. I’m wondering though, in the organizations that you spoke to, have there been challenges that have arisen since this pandemic started in trying to make sure everyone gets the help they need?

Stine: Some particular challenges in our region that other regions may not have: We do have less internet access, so people are less connected in that way. So, getting the word out, I think, is a difficulty that our region may have the other regions may not have as much to deal with that. Some volunteers in Athens, Ohio, for example, started calling people — calling senior citizens — to make sure they knew [about] places to get food. … We many also have people in our region who don’t have phones. And so volunteers in Athens, Ohio are writing letters to those people.

Patterson: In your reporting have you seen examples outside of Appalachia where organizations or communities are taking this idea of connection via the front porch or access point and using it?

Stine: Absolutely. I think that one area where we see this happening a lot is internet access. We talked about internet access and Appalachia, because we know that we don’t have it as much as other places do. But we’re certainly not the only ones. There are school buses now across the country, not just in the Appalachian region, that are being equipped with Wi-Fi. And they’re parking the school buses in places where students and families who don’t have that internet at home, they can drive up and park and use the wireless there.

Patterson: You mentioned that at least the bus drivers in Kanawha County School District are working on a volunteer basis. What did you hear from some of the bus drivers you spoke to about why they think it’s important to still go out every day even though they’re not getting paid?

Stine: Yeah, that was something that really blew me away. I didn’t realize that was happening until I talked to a bus driver. I talked to Rod Stapler, who’s driven for the district for 10 years. And he thought it was just a really important way to give back. He said that the bus drivers know the children, they know who’s in need, and they want to make sure that they’re okay. And they wanted to help those kids have some sense of normalcy and some sense of safety and security. You know, one thing that kids are used to seeing every day is the face of their bus driver. So, if they can see that once a week, even through a window that might help them as well.

Stine’s new story, “Appalachia’s Front Porch Network Is a Lifeline” was produced in partnership with 100 Days in Appalachia, YES! Magazine and WVPB with support from the One Foundation.

The Front Porch Network Is A Lifeline In Appalachia

A traditional gathering place where the public meets the private becomes the critical point of contact for Appalachian families.

On any day in Appalachia, you can find gifts in front of houses, left on porches for the people inside: mushrooms just foraged, cookies freshly baked. The porch is an extension of the home in Appalachia—not only a gathering spot for conversation, but a traditional sharing place. If you want to exchange tools, plants, or hand-me-downs with your neighbor: you put them on the porch. In times of struggle, porches are the vessel to deliver food: frozen meals to new parents, casseroles for grieving families.

Now, because of COVID-19, those practices are becoming more important than ever. It’s not homemade food appearing on neighbor’s porches so much as home-sewn masks, or bags of groceries at the homes of senior citizens. And while school buses are no longer shuttling children to and from schools in the region, the buses are certainly not parked and empty.

More than half of all children in Appalachian Ohio receive free or reduced-price lunch, as reported by the Ohio PTA in 2013. At some elementary schools, the participation rate is almost 75%. In many cases, food distributed to Appalachian children at school feeds a family; thanks to programs such as Blessings in a Backpack, some children go home for the weekends with backpacks of shelf-stable food like canned tuna and peanut butter, designed to help out the whole household.

School buses line up at a loading dock in Charleston, West Virginia, on a Monday morning. The buses will be loaded with food boxes that will be delivered to Kanawha County students.

How are those children—and their families—getting food during the pandemic? Throughout the region, it’s from their school bus drivers.

School bus routes were already established, and the drivers known to families, so it was a natural step that a familiar person could deliver meals to children. In the Appalachian county of Athens, Ohio, in an email to parents, the school asked families to call if they needed food, and meals would be provided by bus drivers, whether or not children had previously been enrolled in free lunch programs.

In West Virginia’s Kanawha County, school bus drivers are leaving meals on porches. Every Monday, drivers drop off enough breakfasts and lunches to last a week. If children are sheltering at places other than at home during the pandemic, families have been asked to call the bus terminal, because the school district tries to reach as many people as possible.

By the first week of April, Kanawha County Schools was providing more than 12,500 meals, with food “delivered to every bus stop along our normal routes,” said district communications director Briana Warner. “Our school bus drivers have stepped up and are our heroes.”

One of those heroes is Rod Stapler, who has driven for the school district for 10 years. “The way we figure it,” Stapler said, “if we go through the end of April, we’ll deliver almost a million meals.”

Importantly, like Athens, Ohio, the Kanawha County School District is not discriminating: Families that say they have a need are having their needs met. “We know based on our data that the vast majority of our students need meals during this time,” Warner said.

And to see the familiar face of their school bus driver, “helps the kids,” according to Stapler. That normalcy “keeps them kind of going,” he said.

Because of their contracts, bus drivers in the county are not required to drive during the pandemic, but they are making the extra deliveries to help the community.

“Mostly all the drivers now that are working are voluntary,” Stapler said. “We can stay home and get paid by our contract, but [we] want to come out and deliver food.”

A Kanawha County school bus driver loads his bus with food boxes that he will deliver in Charleston, West Virginia.

Some bus drivers even delivered coursework in Kanawha County, packets of assignments alongside meals. As Stapler described it, “teachers ran out on some of the routes and delivered their homework [to students]”—providing another familiar, reassuring face in a time of upheaval. This work was not graded or collected, but was designed to help prevent children from falling behind, Stapler said.

That’s a necessity for many Appalachian children without home internet access. Because much learning across the U.S. has shifted online, schools have had to acknowledge that a number of their students still do not have reliable home internet service, particularly in more remote areas.

In Athens, Ohio, parents can pick up loaner technology, such as mobile hot spots and laptops, from the schools in special giveaway days. In Greenville, South Carolina, the school offers free Wi-Fi access with children’s meal pickup.

To address the inequity of households without consistent internet, some school districts in South Carolina equipped school buses with Wi-Fi and parked them in neighborhoods and rural areas. Parents drive children close to the buses to access the wireless, or children ride up on their bikes. In Cincinnati, school buses that functioned previously as bookmobiles, stocked with library sources, are being retrofitted with internet to serve as mobile hubs.

More and more districts outside of the Appalachian region are beginning to offer Wi-Fi in a bus, with school districts in such states as California, Florida, and Colorado enacting the idea.

Lack of internet services is also a perennial obstacle to the delivery of aid and communicating with people in remote areas, such as parts of Appalachia. To inform residents where or how to receive help, Athens volunteers are calling senior citizens, or if people don’t have telephone service, writing letters to them.

Geographically isolated and historically neglected by the rest of the nation, Appalachians are used to rising to the challenge of taking care of their own communities. And when schools closed because of the pandemic and senior citizens became trapped in their houses, these areas were able to mobilize quickly and tap into existing aid networks.

Sharon Uppercue, from Martinsburg, West Virginia, routinely visits her parents, Charles and Waunita Hatmakers, with her daughter, Kaylee Uppercue, to deliver supplies and distantly sit on the porch to talk. Charles Hatmaker, a former coal miner, struggles with asthma, COPD and black lung, leaving him and his wife to rely on friends and family for supplies.

David Keller is development coordinator for the Southeast Ohio Foodbank & Regional Kitchen, which works with local, state, and federal organizations to serve more than 22,000 households in 10 Appalachian counties. But that was before the novel coronavirus outbreak. Comprising low-wage earners and many workers in the service industry, “the population we served wasn’t necessarily in the best situation before [the pandemic],” Keller said.

Mirroring the rest of the country as economic devastation spread, Appalachian food pantries began to see new people “coming into the emergency food network that may have never really considered that option before,” Keller said. “All they know is their family’s hungry and they’re out of work.”

Combined with burgeoning need, the more than 70 food pantries that Southeast Ohio Foodbank assists have had to deal with tightening restrictions and safety concerns, as information about how the virus spreads has changed quickly. “We have had to overhaul basically every part of our program, from what our process is when we come into work each day to how we organize and distribute food,” Keller said.

Changes include taking the temperatures of people working at pantries, distributing masks, and quickly shifting to no-contact food delivery. A food bank worker puts the box into the trunk of a client’s car, or simply leaves it outside to be collected.

This goes against traditional, pre-pandemic recommendations from the USDA about choice and food distribution at pantries. (Ideally, families know best what they need, and should be empowered to choose it themselves.)

The Athens City School District Food Pantry, which serves not only southeastern Ohio schoolchildren and their families, but all of Athens County, has moved to contactless food delivery, passing out pre-packed bags of food in drive-through distributions.

Anna Joyce Williams knows hunger doesn’t stop, even when the routine of daily life does. As student body vice president at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, she developed a food pantry with 12 community partners in the state to serve students and the greater community. “In Appalachia, and Marshall University especially, we are fortunate to see a lot of students come to college [despite coming] from adverse situations,” Williams said. “However, a lot of hardships can follow them during this transition, finances being the largest.”

Like most universities in the nation, Marshall University announced a shift to remote learning before the end of spring break. “During breaks, we [always] see a lot more traffic through our pantry as our food services on campus become more limited,” Williams said. “This time, though, we had a big increase in visitors and needs. I think the pandemic created a lot of fear for people. … The shelves nearly cleared out.”

Less formal means of delivering aid in Appalachia and other rural communities have existed for generations, through neighbors helping neighbors. In a small town, it is easy to know who is in need. What is less easy is asking for help—and reaching out and offering the same, something that some people may not have known to do before the pandemic.

“It’s really our hope that once we weather this, there will be systemic changes in support for hunger relief throughout this country,” Keller of the Southeast Ohio Food Bank said, “because a lot of people are being brought face-to-face with issues that, fortunately, they’ve never had to deal with [before].”

Appalachia knows need, and knows that in times of increased struggle, need increases for all. While much of the country might fall back at this time, Appalachia has stepped up in ways both official and grassroots. “Pandemic or not,” Keller said, “we still have a job to do.”

Bus driver Stapler echoed this statement. “You know the drivers could stay home, but they want to come out, make sure the kids are taken care of,” he said. “Mostly drivers in [the] county always felt that way. We want to look after the kids.”

This article was produced in partnership with YES! Media, 100 Days in Appalachia and West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the One Foundation.