Pastor Ann Testifies Before New York City Council

November 24th, 2011 | Uncategorized

Here’s a transcript of Pastor Ann’s testimony before the City Council’s Nov. 20, 2012 hearing on hunger in NYC:

Good afternoon. My name is Rev. Ann Kansfield, and I serve as the co-pastor of the Greenpoint Reformed Church in North Brooklyn. When I first came to the church, we often had people come to us in need of assistance, sometimes asking for food. In the summer of 2007, our congregation studied our surrounding community. We learned that Greenpoint had over a 30% poverty rate, and when we called 311 to find out about local food pantries in our zip code, we learned there were none. This discovery led us to start a food pantry, which now provides 500-600 bags of free groceries every Thursday.

Having graduated with honors from Columbia University and having a seminary degree, I didn’t think much about what managing a food pantry would involve. But let me assure you, figuring out how to provide food in the face of ever-increasing levels of need takes every bit of my abilities. It also takes an incredible amount of administration and time, not to mention creativity and patience. While various levels of government provide grants that enable us to purchase food, there is next to no funding available to pay for the operational expenses of running a food pantry. In our case, the church provides the pantry with a significant amount of space, most of the utilities, the phone and internet. $9,000 of my $22,000 salary is from a discretionary grant from Councilman Levin, the remainder of this is paid through private individual contributions. I am paid as if I was a part-time contractor, but in reality I spend well over 40 hours a week managing the pantry.

In the course of my lifetime, our society has decided that social and poverty-fighting programs worked best by making life more difficult for those in need. This hasn’t solved the problem of poverty. In fact, poverty has only gotten worse. One of the main responses to this urgent need has been the growth of a network of soup kitchens and food pantries, most of them affiliated in some way with a faith-based organization. For countless people who live on less and less, we represent the last stop toward economic abyss.

These graphs show how the economic downturn has affected our pantry. The number of people we serve continues to grow, and, thanks to increased funding that was part of the 2008 stimulus package, for much of this growth we received increasing allotments of government funding. But now that the stimulus money has run out and the USDA has cut discretionary funding for TEFAP, we’ve seen a profound decrease in food over the past six months. The City’s EFAP funding has not been able to make up for such a drastic decrease in food. This summer was particularly difficult. We had to turn away literally hundreds of our clients because we had no food to give them. Our pantry’s experience is not unique. I have heard from other pantry directors around the city that they had empty shelves, less food and increasing need this summer as well. It is heartbreaking to turn families, seniors, children, homeless individuals, immigrants and the unemployed away, people who have come to rely on us week after week in order to avoid hunger.

On behalf of food pantries and soup kitchens in our City, I would like to ask you to consider the following changes to how our emergency food system operates:

1. Food stamp benefits are a far more efficient way to ensure that no one is hungry in our city. Please find ways to encourage more New Yorkers receive Food Stamps. As a low-income New Yorker myself, I can attest to the miserable service at the HRA office. The long wait times are just the beginning, but often the workers there are rude and come with an unnecessarily supercilious attitude.

2. Please do away with finger imaging. We do not require finger images for corporate executives to receive tax breaks for locating their businesses in our city. Why do we ask poor people who clean their offices to be fingerprinted in order to receive SNAP benefits.

3. Please find a way to fund more of the operational costs, especially the salaries of food pantry managers. And if possible, please find a way to streamline the funding process so that pantry managers can focus on keeping up with meeting demand and not on paperwork. While we are grateful for the discretionary grant, we have spent over 180 hours attempting to fulfill the paperwork needed to receive the check.

4. Please lobby Congress for an increase in TEFAP funding and to maintain current Food Stamp benefit levels, and in the meantime please increase EFAP funding to make up for the difference.

5. When we receive EFAP funding through the Food Bank, pantries have no choice about the food we receive or the date on which it comes. When we receive City Council funding through the Food Bank, we have a choice of foods and delivery dates. Please consider stipulating that pantries have a choice about what foods we can receive with our EFAP funding and when the deliveries are scheduled.

It is in everyone’s best interest that all New Yorkers have enough to eat. Hunger leads people to make choices that they otherwise might regret. No one should have to steal in order to get money for food. As a city, we have made significant strides to reduce crime, but the current unemployment and under-employment crisis that has only intensified in the past four years is creating a situation where more and more New Yorkers are being pushed into desperate situations and, I fear, may begin to make more desperate choices.