Feeding Clients with HIV/AIDS
By Zoe So
September 11, 2009
At the Salvation Army Harlem Temple Corps at Lenox Avenue and 138th Street, Alex Brown, 49, checked in at the food pantry on Thursday morning. He had come downtown from his home in the housing projects on 155th Street in Washington Heights, and has been going to food pantries for almost a year, ever since he lost his job last September. Before becoming unemployed, he had been juggling two or three jobs at a time, including one washing cars for a car rental service.
One avenue west, Henry Hollowell, who is HIV-positive, was at his usual post on the second floor of the Iris House. He sat at a long table, where he ate his free lunch of hot minestrone soup, turkey and cheese sandwich, lettuce salad and a cantaloupe slice. Three or four regulars at the table chatted with Hollowell in familiar tones, and other diners shouted out greetings to him as they sat down with their meals.
Food programs such as Iris House and the Salvation Army are trying to strike a balance between the basic needs of long term clients like Hollowell, who have come to rely on the food program system for nutrition over years and even decades, and the newly needy like Brown, who have turned to food pantries out of hard economic times but continue to seek employment.
Pantries and soup kitchens in New York are going through difficult times since the recession started over a year ago. Tighter public and private budgets have meant cutbacks in Emergency Food Program funding sources. Rising unemployment levels have pushed more people to seek food assistance. And the price of eating is higher now than at the same time last year. Programs are being forced to choose between quantity and quality of the food they give out and the people they can help.
Food programs are struggling to manage the double pressure of decreasing resources and increasing demand, according to Mariana Silva, a spokesperson for City Harvest, one of the major non-profit organizations in New York that collects and distributes food to local food programs throughout the city. She estimates that since last year, the number of people seeking food assistance in New York City has increased by 30 percent at food pantries and 10 percent at soup kitchens.
Iris House, one of City Harvest’s partners, is a community center for HIV/AIDS patients located in Harlem on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard north of 137th Street. It runs a pantry and a community kitchen that serves meals – hot and bag lunches – three times a week. Executive Director Ingrid Floyd said in an interview on Thursday afternoon that Iris House’s Emergency Food Program funding has been cut back $65,000 over the last twelve months, from $492,000 to $427,000, or a decrease of just over 13 percent.
Rising food prices, as tracked by the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Statistics consumer price index, mean that the already reduced funding has lower purchasing power than it did a year ago. For places like Iris House, which increased its distribution of cold bag lunches by 75 percent and pantry bags by 15 percent from the last quarter of 2007 to the last quarter of 2008 to meet higher demand, the only solution has ben to cut the quantity of food given in pantry bags, limit the number of hot lunches distributed and even turn away people seeking food. “The hard part is that we don’t want to turn people away who have HIV/AIDS. They need good nutrition to reduce the harsh effects of their medication,” said Floyd. She is also worried about no longer being able to provide the quantity or quality of nutrition needed by Iris House clients and food program visitors, many of whom are HIV-positive.
At risk are regulars like Hollowell, who is 52 with a grey and black speckled beard and was wearing a black cotton fisherman’s hat indoors. He avoided answering questions about prior employment, but explained that while others who came through the soup kitchen sometimes “just sit in the street,” he has been coming to Iris House for a “long time” – the exact number of years was in dispute amongst his friends – and keeps himself busy.
Hollowell wakes up at 7 in the morning, leaves the house at around 10 a.m., and goes home around 9 in the evening. In between, he goes from one community program and soup kitchen to another, picking up both meals and education on topics like HIV/AIDS, nutrition and information technology. He likes to read and often scavenges through discarded books from Columbia University for his next tome. He is currently reading a book about race relations.
The system-wide juggling of resources has helped the system accommodate Brown and others who have are struggling because of the recession. As Brown waited for his food at the Salvation Army, he removed a wad of paper from his right ear so that he could hear the receptionist’s questions through the high glass window. He had an ear and sinus infection, and had blocked his ear because “didn’t want it to be contagious.” Wearing a white and red striped baseball cap and matching red and white sneakers, the soft-spoken Brown said, “I was brought up that way. If you need food, you go find it however you can. I ain’t gonna beg out on the street. There’s no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed or anything.” Brown told the receptionist he would come back later that afternoon and hurried off to the rest of his day: a doctor’s appointment for his ear infection at Harlem Hospital down the street and a job search in downtown Manhattan.
Social worker Catherine Smith-Lowe observed Brown through the frequently jammed double glass door between the lobby and the front reception area. Smith-Lowe, who usually goes simply by Lowe, runs the nutrition program at the Salvation Army Harlem Temple Corps. She has been facing the same challenges as her counterparts at Iris House. In August, her pantry gave out bags to 100 families, which included 97 children, 190 adults and 110 seniors. Although she did not have last year’s statistics on hand for comparison, she has sensed that there has been a significant increase in food pantry demands in the last year.
Lowe does not expect a reprieve in resource constraints or demand burdens in the near future, especially since the winter holiday seasons are often marked by spiking food requests. Until that reprieve comes, both long term and temporary clients may continue to make do on less food or be turned away at the pantry door.
