With unprecedented levels of food insecurity in Torrington, elected officials joined the Friendly Hands Food Bank on Tuesday to celebrate the renovation of a much larger new site, funded with a $2 million state grant.
Torrington is one of many communities across Connecticut whose residents have seen a dramatic rise in the need for supplemental food since the COVID-19 pandemic. But Friendly Hands in Torrington has been housed in a small residential building, making it challenging to keep up with the more than 11,000 people the pantry now feeds each month.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the state’s recognition that the Northwest corner maybe needs a little help. We need to set aside our pride,” said Torrington Mayor Elinore Carbone at the press conference on Tuesday.
Gov. Ned Lamont said that his administration is doing what it can to fill the gap left as the federal government cuts its supplemental food programs and puts more pressure on states.
“The state is stepping in and doing a little bit more, but we can’t make up the energy and passion and hope and resources” needed to make this real, he said.
The new site is the former site of a local gym, with nearly 12,000 square feet of space. That’s enough to accommodate a grocery store-style shopping experience, second-hand clothing, a space for veterans to relax and cook together, laundry and shower facilities and ample food storage. The area where clients will choose their food items is as big as the entire footprint of the current pantry, storage and all.
Connecticut allocated significantly more money for food assistance this year, but the funds celebrated on Tuesday are not a part of that funding. Rather, the new pantry’s funding comes from a grant approved by the state bond commission in 2023.
The pantry won’t be receiving more food from the state thanks to the grant, but it will be able to harness its storage capacity to get more food, according to Director Karen Thomas. That’s because pantries like Friendly Hands often receive offers from truck drivers to unload pallets of food, like blemished fruit rejected from grocery stores, but without a loading dock, pantries sometimes have to refuse or are unable to store the items.
These days, Thomas puts out calls on social media to announce when a stray truckload of perishable food is available. Need in the region is so ferocious that she can unload pallets of frozen meat, for example, in a couple of hours.
Despite not being a social media guru, Thomas said, she’s amassed an enormous following on the group’s Facebook page: 182,088 views in the past 28 days.
“Who follows a freaking food bank page? Nobody,” Thomas said — unless your family badly needs food, and the food bank periodically holds giveaways of beef, watermelons and new sneakers for kids to go back to school.
“Help is something that everybody needs at one time or another,” Thomas said. She envisions the new center as a state of the art meeting place that can help fulfill Torrington’s needs, from food to clothing to showers and laundry. “We want it to be a community place where people are proud to come and accept and receive the help that we’re able to give.”
Michelle Cook, who completed her term as state representative for the area earlier this year, said that the rise in need can be attributed in part to the fact that there are several smaller communities that rely on Torrington’s food pantry, whereas other areas of the state aren’t as reliant on a single pantry. The current pantry is operating far beyond what it can reasonably handle.
“We’re doing it there, but we’re bursting at the seams,” Cook said.
According to Thomas, Friendly Hands fed just 300 a month people back in 2020, compared with more than 11,000 today. That might also be attributable to the way Thomas and others have breathed new life into the organization since she took it over in February 2020. Back then, the longtime director had died, handing over the job to another director, who quickly died of a drug overdose. Thomas discovered when she took over the pantry that it had almost no money, and she went to Mayor Carbone to hand over the keys.
But Carbone said the pantry’s survival was just too important to the community, which rallied around Friendly Hands. And just in time: a month later, the COVID-19 pandemic brought food insecurity to new heights.
Thomas says that those numbers have only continued to climb, even as federal funding available during the pandemic has disappeared. Cuts to SNAP have people like Jason Jakubowski, the director of Connecticut Foodshare, losing sleep as they imagine a not so distant future when food insecurity reaches a breaking point:
“That is the No. 1 thing that keeps me up at night now,” Jakubowski said. “The SNAP cuts and the Medicaid cuts haven’t even really taken effect yet. So what we’re trying to do here in Connecticut is we’re trying to stay ahead of the curve.”
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
