Recently I had the opportunity to speak at length with my friend and fellow local Nonprofit Leader, Michael Reinke, Executive Director at the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter about food insecurity and what we can (and are) doing in our community to improve things. Food security is a big issue, and one which effects thousands of people in Greater Nashua. What is meant by being food insecure is that at some point during the month you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, or that you cannot afford healthy food without sacrificing something else, like rent, childcare, medicines, etc. When a family is food insecure, they often rely on a variety of social supports to get by, and the consequences of food insecurity can be truly dire.

A few of the consequences of food insecurity to think about include educational consequences, physical health consequences, and mental health consequences. For example, the human body generally utilizes a lot of its calories and nutrients during the first three years of life to literally grow the brain we then rely upon the rest of our lives. When people are poorly nourished or undernourished early in life, the results can be underdeveloped intelligence, inability to properly focus and learn, and mental health disorders. As we get a little bit older, poor nutrition or lack of nutrition can lead to further inability to focus, concentrate, and learn. If you don’t believe this, then simply find the nearest friend you have who is a teacher and ask them how their low-income kids do in school as compared to those kids with enough to eat. And as we get older yet, poor nutrition can lead, ironically, to obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. A big reason for this is that the least expensive foods in most any supermarket are the foods which contain lots of “empty calories” and not a lot of nutrition. Low-cost foods are most often very high in sodium, high-fructose corn syrup, and carbohydrates, and are often very low in vitamins, minerals, and protein. As an interesting exercise sometime, take a walk through the supermarket and compare what you find on the outside of the market to what you find in the inner aisles. The differences in cost and nutritional content will astonish you!

So, since it’s pretty obvious that combatting food insecurity should be a community priority because of the public health and educational benefits, the question begs “what can be done?” And that was the topic of my conversation with Michael Reinke. One area we focused on is an innovative program which was originally started by the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter in the fall of 2019, just prior to the beginning of the pandemic. This program is called the “mobile” or “pop up” food pantry. Originally, NSKS chose three locations for their program: Bronstein Apartments, Davidson Landing, and Dr. Crisp Elementary School in the Crown Hill Neighborhood. The reason for choosing each of these locations was that they are effectively “food deserts,” meaning that there aren’t a lot of good, easily accessible food resources nearby. No supermarkets or food pantries easily within walking distance. Therefore, to access food resources from one of those communities would typically necessitate having transportation or relying on public transportation. Now, for a city its size, Nashua has a good public transportation system. But if we are honest about it, for a person to utilize the bus to go grocery shopping can be very difficult, and especially more so if the person needs to switch busses or has to deal with work, doctor’s appointments, getting kids to school, etc. It can be very difficult.

The idea, therefore, was to bring on a limited basis some of the resources of the food pantry to the neighborhood, rather than forcing the neighborhood to come to the food resources. And this initial experiment worked! As word began to circulate that on specific days of the week, that NSKS would be at one of these locations, people started coming. Then, of course, the pandemic hit. For several months during the winter of 2019/2020 the world seemed to stop spinning and we all went into a crisis management mode. But as we got toward the end of that winter, as a community, we started to again speak about food access, made even more critical because of the economic depression caused by the pandemic shutdowns. In this next iteration of the “pop up food pantry” the idea was to spread out the workload a little bit more so that we could ramp up an even more effective effort. So, starting in April of 2020 we restarted the effort, but this time around with partnerships that included the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Club, United Way, and the Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter. To make for a much more robust and sustainable effort, we divided up the workload. NSKS became the backbone organization for sourcing the foods used in the pop-up markets. Volunteers from the Boys and Girls Club and the YMCA took on the responsibility for getting the food from NSKS and transporting it out to the location of the pop-up pantries. And volunteers from United Way took on the responsibility of distributing the food to the public at the pantries themselves. Quickly, using this model, we were able to ramp up from the original 3 locations to 11 different sites, with 2 or 3 operating every day of the week, Monday through Friday. And during the winter, we selected different locations for an indoors version of the pantry, one per day, every day of the week. Using this expanded model, since April 2020, we have been able to provide food access to an astonishing 13,761 people! At each pantry, clients will find fresh produce and protein items… healthy foods which would otherwise be very difficult to afford on a limited budget. Plans to continue this model are to go at least through the end of 2022 and beyond. I should also mention and recognize that we are now receiving generous sponsorship support from St. Joseph Hospital to assist with this important initiative.

In its next iteration, according to Michael, is the idea to purchase a mobile van to provide more foods and even prepared meals. In Mike’s words, “Far too often we see these problems as insurmountable. As unsolvable. But this is something we’ve been able to make a fairly big impact at a fairly modest cost. Without much investment we could solve an incredibly important problem in our community utilizing these approaches.” I agree!

Of course, there are MANY other factors to the food security puzzle. This includes programs like End 68 Hours of Hunger, focusing on weekend foods for students who receive meals at school during the week, but are food insecure during the weekend. Grow Nashua, which focuses on building sustainable urban farms so that the local community can grow some of its own food. Meals Matter, which addresses the gaps which exist in some of the “free and reduced” cost food programs in the schools. The Hillsborough County Gleaners, which partners with local farms at harvest time to ensure that crops don’t go to waste. And others. In fact, many of these programs are coordinated through a collective effort called the Greater Nashua Food Council, which we are members of along with many of those also cited in this article.

Yes, food insecurity is a big problem and it is an important one, too. At United Way it is our belief that by working together through a model which we call “collective impact” that we can, indeed, create a community in which we can proudly declare that our neighbors and friends can have access to the healthy foods they need for us to have a healthy community, and for what it’s worth, I would say that GREAT THINGS HAPPEN WHEN WE LIVE UNITED.

Mike Apfelberg is president of United Way of Greater Nashua.