S7E2 Feeding Maine: The Fight Against Hunger in Urban and Rural Communities
In this episode, we interview Heather Paquette, Kelly Sirimoglu, and Justin Strasburger on the prevalence of food insecurity in Maine.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Kelly Sirimoglu: Food insecurity in this region is really interwoven with poverty, transportation security, lack of state resources, high levels of poor health, and high levels of disability. So it’s really intertwined.
[00:00:16] Eric Miller: Hello and welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the official podcast of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, where we discuss the policy matters that are most important to Maine’s people and why Maine policy matters at the local, state, and national levels. My name is Eric Miller, and I’ll be your host.
Today we’ll be interviewing Heather Paquette, Kelly Sirimoglu, and Justin Strasburger on the prevalence of food insecurity in Maine. Heather Paquette is guided by her unwavering leadership purpose. Always press forward, always give back. As the president of the Good Shepherd Food Bank in Maine, she leads a dedicated team of hunger relief professionals to address the root causes of hunger by exploring innovative solutions, sourcing nutritious and culturally relevant food, and collaborating with a network of over 600 partnerships across Maine. Heather’s professional history reflects her commitment to innovation. Before joining the food bank, she played a pivotal role at Ahold Delhaize, where she led a team focused on addressing the changing needs of retail consumers and store associates during the industry’s evolution in omnichannel ambitions. As a University of Southern Maine graduate with a degree in business finance, Heather began her career with Hannaford Supermarkets in 1999 as a retail management training program participant. During her 22 years with the company, her role spanned from assistant store manager to vice president retail operations for Maine and New Hampshire. Beyond her professional endeavors, Heather is deeply involved in community service. She serves on the board of Directors for the Boys and Girls Club of Southern Maine and the United Way Thrive 2027 Council, Heather was recognized in the Griffin Reports women of influence in the supermarket industry in 2017 and again in 2021, and she was named in their 40 under 40 in 2016. Heather Paquette resides in Maine with her husband, Brian, and their two children.
After 30 years working in the for-profit world as a marketing and communications professional, employee engagement and customer experience consultant, and business leader, Kelly Sirimoglu joined Center for Food Action in Bergen County, New Jersey. Kelly then relocated to rural Maine in 2022 and joined Piscataquis Regional Food Center as executive director. In December, 2022, the PRFC acquired the Dover Foxcroft Area Food Cupboard, which was rebranded as the Food Center and reopened in February, 2023. Under her leadership, the Food Center has quickly become a model for food pantries in the region, bringing dignity, compassion, and respect back to the Emergency Food System. Kelly is a former board member with Eastern Area Agency on Aging and is an active volunteer with Helping Hands with Heart.
Justin Strassberger is the executive director of Full Plates Full Potentials. Justin has spent his career working to dismantle broken systems and structures to ensure that opportunity exists for all and not just the privileged. He is passionate about the unique role Full Plates plays in ending childhood food insecurity, developing and empowering community led solutions to drive lasting change. He is motivated to realize the day when full plates no longer need to exist. Justin received a BA in Government and teaching from Bowden College and then spent nearly 15 years supporting students from low-income backgrounds to and through college first at Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City, and then at Bottom Line in Boston. In late 2020, Justin followed his heart back to Maine, joining full plates in 2021.
Maine continues to grapple with significant food insecurity challenges with recent data indicating that 13% of households face difficulties accessing sufficient food. This issue is particularly pronounced in rural areas where limited access to resources exacerbates the problem. From recent data published by Feeding America, four of Maine’s 16 counties reach the lower moderate food insecurity threshold with Somerset County the highest at 15.5%. Vulnerable populations, including children, seniors, and low-income families are disproportionately affected leading to broader implications for health, education, and economic stability.
Food insecurity imposes a substantial economic burden on Maine. A study by the Maine Center for Economic Policy estimated that hunger costs the state’s economy approximately $709 million annually, accounting for over 1% of Maine’s GDP. These costs stem from increased healthcare expenses, diminished worker productivity, and adverse educational outcomes.
The prevalence of food insecurity varies across different demographic groups. Nationally, data from the USDA indicates that food insecurity rates are higher among black, non-Hispanic individuals and nearly 23% and Latino individuals over 21%, compared to white non-Hispanic individuals, roughly 10%. While specific demographic data from Maine is limited, these national trends highlight the need for targeted interventions to address disparities among minority communities.
Addressing food insecurity in Maine requires a multifaceted approach, focusing on economic development, equitable resource distribution, and robust support systems to ensure all residents have access to nutritious food. Now let’s hear from our panelists.
Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Food insecurity isn’t new, but its complexities aren’t widely understood. To give context to our conversation and a bit of background, what does combating food insecurity look like in your individual roles? Heather, if you wouldn’t mind starting us off with this question.
[00:05:46] Heather Paquette: So, for Good Shepherd Food Bank, we are the Feeding America Food Bank for the State of Maine. So our role in this is sourcing and distributing 50 million pounds of food throughout the state to over 600 partners, and that includes food pantries, meal sites, schools, and healthcare providers.
[00:06:06] Eric Miller: Okay. Thank you very much.
Kelly, how about you in the Piscataquis area?
[00:06:12] Kelly Sirimoglu: PRFC is located in the Maine highlands, so we serve low-income residents for rural Maine. It’s estimated about 70% of our residents are living at or below the poverty level. Food insecurity in this region is really interwoven with poverty, transportation security, lack of state resources, high levels of poor health, and high levels of disability. So it’s really intertwined and our region is seeing a strong increase in food insecure working families and a lot of younger children.
[00:06:45] Eric Miller: In the studies that I’ve read in preparing for this episode, it’s really interesting how intertwined so many different factors are that then manifest in hunger. Um, and combating hunger requires a very broad approach.
Justin, how about you? What does, uh, combating food insecurity look like in your role at your organization?
[00:07:05] Justin Strasburger: It’s funny that you say sort of, uh, the broad approach because that’s exactly how we think about it. So at Full Plates Full Potential, we are not a direct service provider. We’re a statewide advocacy and capacity-building group focused on expanding and strengthening existing federal child nutrition programs. So we work on things like the school meal programs, summer meal programs, after-school meals, SNAP, and work to really just listen to folks on the ground. Like Kelly and the folks in the schools who are doing the important work of feeding kids and understand what’s working, what’s not, and try to make things better and provide resources and advocacy to help make that a reality.
[00:07:40] Eric Miller: I’m excited to dig into some of those challenges. How do food shortages, funding issues and distribution and logistical difficulties, what have you observed in those challenges and how they affect your operations and food pantries and community cupboards and your partners? Heather, we’ll start with you again.
[00:07:58] Heather Paquette: We’re hearing over and over from our pantry partners that the need is increasing and it’s a complex situation where it’s not just one thing that’s causing need to go up. Simply stated, the members of our communities in Maine are experiencing growth in expenses that outpaces growth in salaries. So we are often experiencing people who work two jobs full-time and still cannot make ends meet financially and need to rely on the emergency food network.
So that’s probably the biggest challenge that we’re experiencing. Just double-digit increased needs. To put this into perspective, Good Shepherd Food Bank is double-digit distribution over last year, and last year was over double-digit distribution over the year before that. So just really continuing to grow in Maine. We’re also hearing produce is very important to our neighbors and members of our communities. Having fresh, nutritious produce is very important. Nourishing people and making sure that people can have a healthy lifestyle and not have health issues that happen when you don’t. And the distribution of produce and the storage of produce and serving of produce is more complicated than cans in boxes.
So one of the things we’ve put a lot of energy and funding into is our Mainers Feeding Mainers program where we source produce from local farmers, 100 farmers throughout the state, and those farmers deliver their produce directly to our pantry partners. So really trying to provide better access to fresh produce and really working hard to address the increased need in our state.
[00:09:37] Eric Miller: I’m amazed by, I’ve had some opportunity to see how some food logistics happen, and I can’t even imagine trying to juggle all of the things that you have to in order to make sure that the various types of food with various lifespans and ability to be consumable. That’s just amazing to me. Kelly, we’ll get into the, like the rural element of it in the next question, but what are some of the challenges that you face in your organization?
[00:10:06] Kelly Sirimoglu: It’s really difficult to take the rural out of my area because my challenges and the challenges of the food pantries and organizations that we support are really impacted by something that is a result of geography, which is that there are fewer businesses and employers in our area. So from a fundraising point of view, there’s very few businesses I can go to to have them partner and help me, because they’re just not here. Additionally, just funders in general, there are so few that support Maine, but then also because there are fewer businesses, there are fewer places for me to go and purchase food. I can work with Good Shepherd, they’re amazing partner, but otherwise, there’s really no one else that will drive this far north to distribute food.
So I have, uh, I can buy retail through Amazon or Walmart, but I really can’t partner with an organization to distribute it from Portland all the way up here. So it’s a massive challenge for us as far as having access to fresh, healthy food. Uh, we do rely heavily on the Mainers, uh, Mainers Feeding Mainers program.
We got about, I want to say about 10,000 pounds or more last year from our area of farms. It’s a beautiful program. It means that I have lettuce, and mushrooms, and fresh tomatoes, and cucumbers to put back into the emergency food system in Piscataquis. We deliver for Good Shepherd to 22 agency partners. So when we take in those Mainers Feeding Mainers donations, we can then in turn distribute it out to other pantries in the, in the network.
So we have solutions in the summer, which are amazing. But off season, it’s really difficult and challenging to have access to the nutritious items that you want to be able to provide to the people that we’re serving.
[00:11:55] Eric Miller: Yeah, that does sound like an incredible challenge. Justin, from your perspective and some of the increasing demand that Heather was talking about in some of the logistics and seasonal challenges that Kelly was talking about, what challenges do you all face and how do you interact with some of those trends that Heather and Kelly were talking about?
[00:12:15] Justin Strasburger: Sure. So, you know, again, most of the, the programs we’re talking about are happening in, in place-based settings. Uh, so primarily schools is the largest area, and there’s a number of challenges there. So the biggest one is that school meal programs historically were set up to essentially be sort of their own businesses within schools.
Very few of them receive funding out of local school budgets. They’re meant to, in large ways, be self-sufficient based off of the federal reimbursements that are attached to each meal that’s served, and that reimbursement amount varies depending on who’s eating that meal, whether they qualify for a free meal, or reduced-price meal, or a paid meal.
There’s lots of challenges implicit in that. There’s a lot of administrative burden of figuring out who’s who and keeping track of everything there, which takes a lot of time and energy. There’s also the challenge of these distinctions of deciding who’s at those levels are based on pretty outdated federal poverty guidelines that we know are absolutely not keeping track with inflation or just the general living expenses. And so I think that’s the biggest issue and that’s one of the reasons why we have led the charge to make Maine one of the first states in the country to have free school meals provided for all students. because it really reduces a lot of those burdens. But we still have to do that at the state level rather than that happening at the federal level, which is challenging.
Outside of that, you know, schools and programs have some of the same challenges around distribution issues and access to food. In many ways, the price per meal at schools are artificially low because they are based on a program that was also set up, in addition to feeding kids, to subsidize U.S. agriculture and, you know, 70, 80 years ago when these programs were founded U.S. agriculture looked very different than it did today. But as you ended up with a lot of mergers and conglomerization that happened in the, uh, in the eighties and the nineties and today, you end up with a lot of subsidies in the form of these sort of discounted products that the federal government purchases from agriculture and then gets out to schools at a very low, artificially low rate.
These subsidies are going to a smaller and smaller number of agriculture interests. They’re not going to the small family farms anymore, they’re going to the massive corporations. And so what you’ve seen is not just a challenging economy if you’re trying to do things like local foods in schools, which everyone wants to do, but the cost is higher.
One of the reasons it’s higher is because we’re artificially deflating the cost of the other stuff. But the other challenge is that that leads to, is a lot of things that travel very far to get to plate, which means a lot of sort of heat and serve products and less scratch cooking, which is not just a challenge around the amount of food, but about the quality of food and the amount of things like preservatives that are in the meals and how processed the meals are. And so that’s a big issue that we’re trying to counteract.
[00:15:00] Eric Miller: The trends in agriculture that you were mentioning is, is really interesting to me as to get to the rural focus. You people largely associate rural areas with cultivating food and growing crops and being able to maybe have an easier time to localize food systems.
However, those areas may be at greater risk of having access to food, which is definitely counterintuitive, but. How have you seen food deserts grow in rural areas of Maine in the past few years? And Kelly, have you seen some of those trends in how food production has changed nationally and how has that affects rural areas?
And I’m really curious how Maine’s urban and rural areas have some similarities and differences as well.
[00:15:46] Kelly Sirimoglu: I can’t comment on the urban. I’ve only lived in Maine in a rural area. I can say that we have a lot of food deserts in the Maine highlands. There’s maybe two or three grocery stores that are in our county to begin with, and then the rest of it is convenience stores.
So we have communities, let’s say Brownville, or even here in Dover, there’s one grocery store in Dover. Milo has a very tiny grocery store. So some of the communities we’re serving have a lot of people, but the level of stores that they have access to are mostly shelved and long-shelf product, not fresh produce, not fruit, not food that supports specific diets. It’s really difficult to be plant-based in this area. It’s really difficult to be someone who’s looking for prepackaged diabetic meals. You can know how to cook, you’re fine, because there’s, you can find the items that you need, but there’s really a lot of food swamps more than food deserts, right?
So there are places to buy food, but it’s not high quality food. Just as an example, there’s a gentleman that we serve, he walks two and a half miles from his cabin in the woods to a main road to catch a taxi, to drive an hour to a food pantry. He lives in a town where there is no grocery store, and then he turns around and takes that taxi all the way back and then walks two and a half miles uphill to his, his little cabin carrying the groceries that he has from us.
If we didn’t have fresh produce— and it’s an amazing program that Good Shepherd has with both Mainers Feeding Mainers and the produce that we receive— he would have no way of getting that. There’s just no other place available to him to find fresh produce. And he’s one person in the thousands that we’ve been serving each year. So it’s really, I, I don’t want to paint a negative picture, but it’s really a crisis state in this area. There’s not enough access to fresh, healthy foods and it’s, it’s a big problem for rural areas. It’s not getting better because we have no mass transportation. So even if there was an amazing grocery store that opened up, there’s no way for people to access it.
[00:17:56] Eric Miller: Yeah, I did not realize that there were so few formal grocery stores in Piscataquis County. That really is incredible. Heather, would you mind talking about the urban and rural similarities and, and dissimilarities, uh, between those geographies?
[00:18:13] Heather Paquette: I, I was nodding profusely while Kelly was speaking about the unique challenges of rural markets and she would know really better than anyone.
Uh, she’s absolutely right. There is, there is an access issue, there are transportation issues, there are viability issues, all unique challenges that we experience with rural markets that make them have a disproportionate lack of access to food from. I remember the first time I rode a driver and it us several hours to get to our first destination it was windy roads in a very large truck. We send a truck to Jackman, Maine once a month. We are Maine’s food bank, so that means we go to all places in Maine, and some places in Maine are extremely difficult to get to. So I can only imagine if you consider our resourcing and our responsibility and the fact that we experience challenges, you then apply that to others you can quickly start to see why we have areas that have a disproportionate access to food. So, you know, urban markets, if they have challenges that are very big, they’re just very different. So you think about things like transportation and access to retailers, it becomes more of a cost of living challenge in the urban markets and less of an access.
So the problem still exists, it’s just different. So cost of living in the urban markets is rising dramatically, and even cost of transportation or viability of having transportation options is very, very challenging as well. So it really turns into a affordability problem in the urban areas. And so we need to meet each community with where they’re at, and it’s been very important to understand the unique challenges of urban markets, rural markets, and other communities, and in urban communities, rural communities, and all other communities, and figure out how to thoughtfully address the needs of those communities.
[00:20:13] Eric Miller: I could ask you a hundred questions about just the logistics that you need to work with to get all that food across to all these nooks and crannies across Maine. It was famously, you can’t get there from here, but you do. You do do that, which I really appreciate it. Justin, have you been seeing the similar socioeconomic determinant type of observations that Heather has made when it comes to the different urban, suburban, rural settings that you’ve worked in?
[00:20:42] Justin Strasburger: Yeah, I mean, I think the one real constant about food insecurity is it exists in every single community in the state. Not necessarily what folks might imagine when they think about food insecurity, if they’re not food insecure themselves. You see this in the statistics that we tend to use, which are almost anyone who works in this field will tell you there’s no way they’re not undercounting the need because you’re relying on survey data and, and asking folks to self-identify as being food insecure.
So you’re asking folks to get over individual pride and asking for help and these things that are hard things as humans to do. And so when you know, we see data. That says we have one in five, uh, whatever the updated one is right now, I think it’s one in five kids in this state who are food insecure. We know that’s just wrong.
You know, if we look at other data such as, you know, United Way has done some wonderful data on looking at a population they called the ALICE population, which stands for asset limited, income constrained employed. Essentially, this is the missing middle-class. This is the group of folks in Maine who are employed, but based off of looking at actual living conditions where they live the amount they’re paying on rent or a mortgage to living expenses, that sort of thing. They’re not able to consistently make ends meet. When you look at that, you’re talking about almost 50% of Maine families fit into that category. Either that category or the actual impoverished category, which is, again, outdated based on those, those limits.
So I think it, that’s one thing I think just for everyone to keep in mind is that the face of food security is your neighbor. It’s not necessarily someone in a very urban environment or far-flung rural environment. It’s who you might not expect and can change pretty quickly for folks, uh, because everyone’s circumstances are different.
I think one of the big challenges we see in the programs we work on is these federal nutrition programs have been around for decades and have had sort of bureaucracy upon bureaucracy laid on top of them, and so they work generally well at a high level, but the needs of individual communities are individual, and there is not enough flexibilities offered currently to allow for communities to really take the approach that’s going to make the most sense for them. One example is that during the pandemic when one of the best things that happened during that time was that the federal government decided to offer massive waivers on all these programs to essentially allow communities to offer the programs that made sense for them. Didn’t have to worry about specific eligibility requirements. You saw communities get very creative and find ways to support their communities, and when those waivers went away, a lot of those flexibilities went away and we’ve been able to get some of them back, but they’re based off of federal-level definitions of say, rural and urban.
And the reality is, is in Maine, we have only a small handful of urban by the definition that the federal government uses areas, and even those urban areas are not urban. From the perspective of access to programs, as you’ve heard Kelly and Heather talk about. I mean really, unless you are in a large urban center with abundant and effective and on-time public transportation, which, I don’t know if that meets the qualification in any city, but certainly not in Maine. Right. You might as well be rural. And so I think that’s the challenge we often see, which is one of the reasons why things like school meals for all are so important because you’re talking about meeting people where they already are, and in particular the population we focus on at full plates of children.
When you’re talking about you have this captive population of K-12 students who have to go to school every day. That’s an audience that we are able to feed because we know where they’re going to be every day. And so we have to take advantage of those kind of opportunities. And we’ve seen some really great exciting things partnering with local food pantry partners on some of the other programs like Summer Meals to think about how can we have the summer meal site that’s offering families a hot meal that the kid may need that summer be the same place that a family can pick up groceries from the food pantry, be the same place that a free dental clinic is showing up. So it’s one place for a family in need to have to go to and ask for help. Again, we get back to that in that mindset piece, and the more that we can shift this to be putting the onus and the burden on the folks at a high level delivering it, not the on the ground folks who have plenty to worry about and less on the people like seeking out the food, the more impactful we know these programs can be and the bigger reach they’re able to have.
[00:24:48] Eric Miller: That’s quite sobering statistics, thinking about how many people are being affected, um, and, and undercounting as I work in opioid epidemic policy research, undercounting is something that I’m very used to working with unfortunately.
And so I want to pull out a couple threads you were talking about there, Justin. Some of the stigma associated with people admitting to being food insecure. And so we know that a lot of people are being affected by this problem. Are there some folks that are traditionally more considered to be vulnerable, such as those who are also housing insecure, as well as those who are immigrants near and far, who may feel less comfortable or less welcome in trying to procure food from a local food pantry? Is that something that you can confirm in your work, um, that you’ve seen, or is that something that I’m just kind of pulling together and that’s not necessarily true? Uh, Heather, I, I see you nodding.
[00:25:40] Heather Paquette: We’ve been having a lot of conversations about this and I appreciate the question and any opportunity we have to talk about it, we would like to take it.
So I think about underrepresented communities in our state and in our larger nation, and there are facts that support and research that supports underrepresented communities experience food insecurity at a higher rate. And we could spend the rest of the afternoon discussing the reasons why that happens and all of the different pieces to that.
It is a fact, and as I think about our work and the challenges we’re experiencing with growing need in our state, it is impossible to focus on that without focusing on the needs of underrepresented communities and the degree to which they have disproportionate rates, food. Our entire strategic plan is built on the foundation of that as we figure out where we want to place our efforts and where we want to put our energy.
That’s all front of mind for the organization and it’s getting harder. And so those are the things that we will continue to focus on in the state of Maine. And I would say there are a few things that I can speak about in terms of tangible initiatives that we’ve put into place. We have programs like Farm Fresh Rewards that we get state support with, where we double the SNAP dollars for produce items at certain retailers.
We have had a targeted focus on having want to led retailers as part of the network of that in an attempt to really support those underrepresented communities. We talked a lot about Mannar feeding Mainers, and I did never give up an opportunity to talk about Mannar feeding Mainers. It’s a program we’re incredibly proud of and want to continue to grow.
Of the almost 100 farmers that we support with Mannar Feeding Mainers, 22 of them are want to led, and that represents an underrepresented community. Feels redundant, but that number reflects. In underrepresented community, and those partners are very important to us in understanding what these communities need and how to address those needs.
So those would be some examples of our work coming to life in serving underrepresented communities.
[00:27:44] Eric Miller: Yeah, that’s great. Kelly, have you noticed in your region of the state some of these disproportionate effects on certain populations?
[00:27:52] Kelly Sirimoglu: No, uh, Piscataquis is almost 98% white. Anglo don’t have real language barriers occasionally, but we are homogenous. So really culture hasn’t come into play in this community, much different than my past life. So it’s taken some getting used to that. Really the populations for us, it’s people who don’t have transportation, people that don’t have homes, people that can’t read. Those are really the groups that we focus on trying to help.
[00:28:24] Eric Miller: Yeah, it’s interesting how those different lack of access to opportunity and proximity to resources can really lead someone to being in a situation where they’re food insecure. Justin, in your work around the state. What have you noticed about this specific type of vulnerability?
[00:28:41] Justin Strasburger: Yeah, I mean, so again, just from a broad vulnerable population, children are about as vulnerable as it gets, right?
And so I think sound like a broken record talking about the Healthy S School meals for all. But it is really, it’s making a difference in a tangible way. We know it’s saving families on average, at least $160 per student per month. And that’s maybe the difference for some of those middle-class families that I was talking about between.
Paying for heating oil or putting a meal on their own plate. You know, they’re able to depend on 10 meals a week. That’s not enough, but that’s, you know, 10 meals a week that their kid can go and get breakfast and lunch. In terms of other populations, though, it is absolutely something we’re focused on because we know that that meal only works if kids actually eat it, right?
And there are lots of populations that have different cultural dietary needs or other dietary restrictions in that if we’re not taking into account that we’re leaving some folks behind. So we’ve been really proud to invest in some work to support, uh, Halal. Meals, being able to be served in schools and uh, whole school kitchens.
Being able to be Halal-certified to allow for Muslim observant students and other cultures that observe Halal, be able to take advantage of that. And we work a lot just with students themselves to really, youth voice often gets lost in a lot of this, and so we want to hear directly from them about what they want to eat.
And again, you know. Overwhelmingly, the, the feedback we get is that they want things that are fresher, that taste better, and you know, that’s what the folks want to serve too. So we’re really excited. We got a, a couple years ago we got a $10 million cooperative agreement through the United States Department of Agriculture that thankfully we’ve been able to pull down all the funds for prior to any of the federal funding freezes, so that is still moving ahead, but that’s allowed us to invest in nine projects across the state, totaling investments of about eight and a half million dollars. And all of these are targeted at connecting local agriculture and fisheries directly into school meals. So these are projects including things like up in Skowhegan where you have two small women-owned businesses, main grains, and the good crust that are working to get healthy whole grain, manmade pizza crust into our school’s cafeteria. So it’s not about like just vegetables, right, you know? Because you also have to get something kids will eat, my kids eat school meals and every Friday there’s some version of pizza. A lot of it is that pre-frozen sheet-pan, heat-and-serve stuff, not all of it, they’re doing their best, but if we can get it so that we’re able to invest in a product like that, get it to scale, so the sort of r and d of it all is taken care of and so the price point gets to a level that schools can afford it.
How much better is that for our kids? Right. Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association in Brunswick is uh, one of the recipients and they’re working to get Maine local caught fish into school meals. They were just at my kids’ elementary school testing out these fish tots that they had come up with and they taste delicious, and all the kids are eating them and there’s zero preservatives in those.
And they’re easy to eat, they’re easy to make. And so there’s just a lot of that kind of opportunity that we have here that, yes, eight and a half million dollars is a big investment, but it’s not in the big scheme of things when we’re talking about upfront investment and being able to make these things happen and connect these dots.
So I think there are challenges, absolutely, but there’s also just a lot of opportunity that we see to be able to do things differently because Maine is a state that is still pretty community- focused and has a willingness to collaborate and a desire to collaborate that frankly doesn’t exist. Every other state, and I think that’s something we have going for us.
And so the missing gap there is just resources and again, that sort of 50,000 foot view to be able to sort of put all the pieces together. And that’s just, that’s a resource problem, which I know I sound dismissive saying it’s just a resource problem, but that’s way easier to solve than a mindset shift problem. Shifting mindsets is significantly harder, and we have to do that too. We need, you know, everybody else who’s not experiencing food insecurity to really understand that food insecurity is a societal failing and not an individual failing. But I think thanks to the great work of folks on this call and others, I think we are chipping away at that, at that stigma that you’re talking about.
We know when school meals for all went into effect. One of the reasons participation means leading the country in terms of participation increases is because it got rid of that stigma. No longer are we asking kids to raise their hand and saying, Hey, I’m a free lunch kid. No, I’m a reduced-price kid.
Anytime you’re asking a kid to other themselves in front of their peers, that’s a recipe for disaster and just something that is just a burden that should never be placed on a kid. So there are these kind of solutions that we are doing and that are working, and we just need to keep moving forward on.
[00:33:10] Eric Miller: It’s so encouraging to hear creative examples like that, and I frankly, for lunch day, I would love to have some of those fish tots. But I’m glad that you brought up some of the resource potential shifts and some, we’ve talked about some planning and strategy. Heather, you’ve talked about some of the, uh, good Shepherd Bank’s grand strategy for the upcoming years.
In 2019, Governor Mills and the Maine Department of Agriculture Conservation Forestry created a roadmap called Ending Hunger by 2030. What are some of the effects of this plan that have manifested in your areas and how have some of the federal shift in budget, how do you foresee that to affect your operations?
Heather, we’ll start with you.
[00:33:49] Heather Paquette: First of all, we are very grateful for the state’s leadership in prioritizing hunger relief and recognizing that it’s a systemic issue and not just a short-term problem in our state. So really a gratitude to the administration for prioritizing this. We are very grateful partners in this work.
We actually used it as a framework for our strategic plan for our 2025 to 2030 strategic plan at Berkeley Bank. And I would say for us it’s really helped us understand where we counted on and expected to lead in certain spaces under relief food security. Those would be areas of sourcing and distributing food In supporting our 600 plus partner agencies and making sure that we have the best experience possible for our neighbors, and ensuring we have the skill building and internal bed strength to bring our work to life.
And then where are the areas where we will be partnering with others? And I think the roadmaps and hunger really clearly tells us where are we needed at the table to help provide data and facts and resourcing, and where do we need to work alongside other nonprofits in our great community, such as Full Place, full Potential, United Way, and other organizations to really think together and figure out how do we creatively solve problems and maximize the value of the limited resources the non-activity has in our state. So I would say public policy and advocacy is something that we really look to come together and work together on. There are ways to tell the same story different ways, and bring our expertise and our facts into the conversation. That really helps tell the larger story and helps us make really great work is really important. The work is only as important as the resourcing energy that we’re able to give to it. So we really hold that in high regard from my team and with our partners, and it’s going to be a marathon and it’s not going to be a sprint. There’s a lot of work in that multiple hundred-page document that we put together, and the work is really, the magic’s going to happen when we start bringing to workspace.
[00:35:59] Eric Miller: Yeah, and we would love to include a link to your reports or resources that you would like to share for your respective organizations in the description of this episode. Kelly, for the PRFC, how does your organization fit into some of these larger strategic initiatives, and what other opportunities and challenges do you see in that?
[00:36:20] Kelly Sirimoglu: For our organization, we’re watching eagerly as the state makes progress towards these goals. We haven’t really felt its impact here. I think the free school meals impacts our area so much more. Again, we really don’t have cultural relevancy. We don’t have a lot of other components of the Ending Hunger by 2030 don’t really apply as much to rural Maine, but things that we’re hoping will continue or increase are things like strengthening SNAP, obviously eliminating barriers to food access, reducing paperwork, reducing some really silly laws like if you are on SNAP and you don’t apply for, for a lie heap, you can have your SNAP benefits reduced. I mean, there’s some really. Dumb things out there that are impacting people’s ability to get food. So as the state moves forward, we’re really excited to see the progress and we look forward to, to seeing its impact in our region.
[00:37:22] Eric Miller: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Justin, how does your organization fit into some of these greater plans, and what are some opportunities and potential challenges that you see in the upcoming years?
[00:37:33] Justin Strasburger: So, yeah, I think it just from the starting place, I think the strength of the plan. Is twofold. The first is that it is really comprehensive and it puts the burden of ending hunger where it belongs, which is not on sort of increasing the food that could get out there, and on truly addressing the underlying issues of poverty and access to resources.
Now that is a benefit from the perspective of we’re speaking honestly about the, the topic. It is a challenge in that it makes it a whole lot harder to address. Right. Um, and I think since that plan has come out, um, we’ve seen some of those challenges in implementing it. The other real benefit of that plan was in that process of putting together that plan, they pushed pause about halfway through and they made sure that a, uh, group of folks who are actually experiencing and have experienced poverty and food insecurity didn’t just react to the plan as it was, but had an opportunity to really have input factored into the plan as it was developed.
So that made it a stronger plan. It made it one that I think has more buy-in, at least philosophically from folks who actually experienced food insecurity in terms of it reflecting their lived experience, and it is a policy behemoth to try to get through. Where we are at today is we are sort of finally at implementation phase of this I’d say after a lot of sort of starts and stops and some leadership transitions in the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation in the Future, which houses this plan, I’m optimistic that we’re going to see some real movement. There’s a couple different, without getting too in the weeds of things, but there’s sort of two pieces of this work. There’s the work that has to happen with the state government that has to have all the different agencies working cooperatively outside of their silos, right? And that’s a challenge for anyone who’s ever worked with state government. That’s hard to do, right? There’s a lot of competing interests and things like that, but the Governor’s Office is going to be leading that effort.
And then outside of the, the state government, you have all of the nonprofits and the other community organizations that are doing this work every day that we also need to be doing this in a coordinated, efficient way so that we are maximizing our resources and our opportunities. And that’s work that Full Plates has stepped up to staff essentially to sort of provide some backbone support to help make sure that that moves forward in ways.
I’d say there are six priorities that were identified in the most recent areas of aligned action for the next year or two. There’s a couple that I think really stand out and some that I think give three big sort of general buckets. One is to maximize federal nutrition programs, and to me, I’ll come back to that because I think that’s our biggest area of opportunity. The second is to look at that narrative change. I talked about that earlier, about the need for everybody to just sort of reframe their thinking of what food insecurity is, understand the root causes and the need to address it systemically. As part of that, thinking about the things that are not food, thinking about transportation barriers, housing insecurity, healthcare access, childcare access, all those other things, living wages, right? All that’s rolled into that. And the last one that I think Kelly touched on is just ensuring that throughout all of this, we’re investing in the leadership and inclusion of impacted communities so that we’re not creating top-down solutions that once they get down to the folks who actually need them, they’re like, that’s not actually what we asked for, what would be helpful. So those second two are critically important and I think factor into all the plans. But in terms of the low-hanging fruit, to the extent there is some, it’s absolutely maximizing federal nutrition programs and school meals for all is an example of what it looks like when we start to take a big swing at that, because that is how we are maximizing that federal nutrition program.
SNAP is a huge opportunity in this state for those who are unfamiliar. SNAP used to be called food stamps. It is our single biggest anti-hunger and anti-poverty program in this country. It is a benefit that goes directly to the impacted individual, which means that you’re giving them more dignity to go to the store and make their own purchasing decisions.
There’s still lots of restrictions on what they can and can’t buy with it, so it’s not perfect. But it is giving them more options, which is really beneficial. The problem is, is that not everybody who is eligible for SNAP knows they’re eligible. If they are eligible, they don’t necessarily know how to apply for it.
And I’ll offer this asterisk that I’ll come back to, I promise. But right there, that’s an opportunity. And every state each year is required to submit to the federal government an outreach plan for how they plan to do just that. Let folks who are eligible for SNAP know that they’re eligible and if they need help applying, help them apply.
There are federal funds available to support that matching federal funds, and Maine has to date, not necessarily had a partner who would be able to step up and sort of support them in that. And the state government is agency is not in a capacity position to sort of lead that. So we haven’t been maximizing that opportunity.
In Vermont, for example, they have 24 partners on their SNAP Outreach contract, and the budget’s a million and a half dollars a year, which means they’re getting $750,000 of federal funding coming into the state just to help them outreach to the folks who are eligible already. Help them apply. And what I’ll tell you is that a lot of folks in this state are already doing SNAP outreach and getting no money to support them with it, federal or otherwise, and so partners like Good Shepherd and others to try to get means first contract up and running on this to start leveraging some of those dollars. So I think there’s examples like that of there are federal dollars being left on the table, just opportunities passing us by, and we need to be in a position, as a collective, and this is the benefit of the ending hunger work, sort of bringing us all together to be up at the plate and take more swings because we’re not going to make contact with the ball unless we’re able to make more swings. Now the giant asterisk is whatever is going to happen at the federal level, and unfortunately we are, by the time this podcast posts, there may be more details, but the budget reconciliation, bills making their way through Congress right now.
That are going to be demanding massive cuts from every agency. There is no way. The agencies that administer federal nutrition programs are going to be able to meet those cuts without making massive cuts to things like school meals, programs and SNAP Medicaid, things like that. And whether that comes in the form of increasing eligibility requirements or cutting reimbursement amounts for school meals or other things, there’s just no math in which they’re going to be able to make that happen without doing that, and that is going to be catastrophic. I- I’m not speaking hyperbolically. I wish I was. It’s going to be catastrophic, not just here in Maine, but across the country. Food insecurity has been rising as steeply as it has in the last 15 years. In the couple years since the pandemic here in Maine, it’s risen less slowly than the rest of the nation.
And we believe it’s because of some of the investments you made, like school meals for all that have helped us stem that tide. But if you start cutting eligibility for SNAP lowering reimbursements for school meals, not only is it going to blow a massive hole in our state budget and cause some really difficult questions, and I don’t see a way forward without it leading to tax increases somewhere.
It’s just going to increase a massive administrative burden if we are to believe some of the policies that they are planning to put forth as part of this, including, for example, requiring income verification for every single person getting a free or reduced meal in school. It’s beyond just filling out an application.
It means that someone has to then go check taxes, court documentation, maybe, which means families have to provide it. So what we are likely to see. If I fast forward a year or so is I bet you’re going to see numbers that would suggest that food insecurity has plummeted in the state and nationwide, but it has not.
What will actually have happened is we will be massively undercounting people because we have increased the burden on the people who are food insecure. To get access to these resources or to justify that and massively along the way increase the burden on the on the ground Providers who are already don’t have capacity or barely have capacity to do the work they’re already doing.
The last thing we want a school nutrition director doing is having to spend their time. Chasing kids down for their parents’ tax forms. I’d much rather them be working with their local farmer to figure out how to get more of their Aroostook County potatoes into our kids’ french fries instead of Idaho potatoes trucked ha halfway across the country.
Right? So it just doesn’t make any sense. It is absolutely not the way to eliminate waste in this country if you think that is what it is, and the long-term negative impacts on this, and frankly, the financial impacts on this. Are going to be massive. So I hate to sort of end on a sour note there, but that is the cliff that we are all facing unfortunately, and it’s a big unknown right now.
[00:45:59] Eric Miller: Yeah. Thank you so much for discussing some of those programs. So in depth. We always appreciate going into the weeds here and why we have this podcast, this really dig into some of these really difficult problems that we face our country and continually. So as we close out our conversation. I would love to hear any of your parting thoughts or comments on things we haven’t covered quite yet as we close out.
Uh, Heather, if you don’t mind starting us off.
[00:46:25] Heather Paquette: It’s important for me to say Hunger is a solvable problem and it’s also not a simply solvable problem, and the solution can’t and isn’t. That we source and distribute more food to people experiencing food insecurity in the state of Maine. Good Shepherd Food Bank, a short 12 years ago was delivering 11 million meals to this state.
We are delivering over 40 million meals and growing at 10%, uh, increases every year. That is not a sustainable solution to food insecurity in our state. So we are grateful to have the wonderful partners that we have in place in the state of Maine. We call it the food security ecosystem. I think Justin referenced that earlier, where there’s a a lot of different partners that come together and play a specific unique role.
That allows our work to happen. I believe Maine could be the first state in our country that figures out how to achieve food security, and it’s going to require a lot of energy resourcing and prioritization from all of the different partners in the ecosystem. Justin spoke about SNAP, and I cannot emphasize enough.
SNAP is going to provide a more resilient state and it’s a more sustainable solution. We will not be able to source and distribute enough food to meet the needs of the state of Maine if we don’t have a strong, resilient SNAP community. And so I, that’s something that Shepherd Food Bank very strongly believes in.
And we advocate along with our partners for strengthened SNAP and I share his fear that if we don’t have a strong SNAP position in our state, that we won’t be able to do our work. I call that snowplow initiatives. Our work is a reasonable amount of work, and we can do it because the snow plow went through and took care of.
The first few pieces of food insecurity, and then we are here to catch the remaining view so that we’re, we’re here for that and we’ll continue to be, and we can’t be the only solution in the state of Maine. So really, you know, having each part of the ecosystem come together to provide a very strong resiliency.
[00:48:30] Eric Miller: Thank you, Heather. Kelly, what are some of your parting thoughts as we close out?
[00:48:34] Kelly Sirimoglu: Very much aligned to what Justin and Heather have said. I think it’s about 50 years ago that Harry Chapin founded with some of his partners food pantries throughout the United States. He founded these food pantries, but quickly realized that just providing food wasn’t the answer.
That you had to do more on policy to get people out of poverty so that you wouldn’t have to keep providing food. And it’s been 50 years and we still haven’t solved for that yet. I think that it can be solved. I think that me sending more meals out my door is not the answer. We really have to find a solution to lift people out of poverty, and I think that SNAP is one of the best tools that we have to do that.
I would love to see that strengthened. I’m nervous that that’s not going to be the case, but that really would be an ideal way to start getting us there. I’m hopeful. I’m trying to be hopeful as the boots on the ground facing the people. I can’t, just from our little. Corner of the world. I cannot absorb another 300 or 500 people every month.
There’s no way we can do it and still be here. It’s not that there’s not enough food and there’s just not enough resources to get the food to the people who need it.
[00:49:49] Eric Miller: Yeah. Thank you all for the work that you do. And I think in Justin, maybe in your bio it says that you’re trying to work yourself out of a job and, uh, that really resonates with me And Justin, do you have any, uh, final thoughts to close this out?
[00:50:01] Justin Strasburger: Just, I think one more thing on SNAP, uh, just because I think the economic impact is an important one too, right? And it’s not just on the people who are using the benefit. You know, one thing folks should know is that federal dollars coming into the state are not Mainers Tax dollars Main is a taker at the federal level, which means that the dollars coming in that are federal dollars are Californians tax dollars and New Yorkers tax dollars.
And every tax dollar that comes, every federal dollar that comes in for SNAP. Equates to about a dollar 79 in local economic impact. That means that a, a federal dollar is coming from California and is generating that dollar and it’s staying here in Maine. So it’s good, it is good economic policy for us to embrace SNAP in this state.
But SNAP aside, you know, I gave a lot of negative things. My team knows that I do not like when we just sort of shout out all the negatives without giving people something to do with all that information. So. If folks are interested in staying more involved and understanding what’s happening, I encourage you to visit our website fullplates.org. You could sign up for our newsletter, action alerts, that kind of stuff. But if I can offer folks a sort of personal to do, you know, I talked about mindset shift and that has to start with an individual. And I think right now we are in a very polarized time in this country and a lot of that gets. Framed through red versus blue, and the reality when it comes to food insecurity is it is not a red or blue issue. It is both. And there are tons of food insecure folks who identify as Republicans in the state, tons of food insecure Democrats, Independents, and Unenrolled, right? This is an issue of folks who are able to afford the cost of living and those who cannot, and for us to start moving in the right direction.
I would encourage everybody. To try to get outside of your bubble a little bit and try to lead with inquiry rather than lead with assumption and resist the urge to just pit people against one another. Because the reality is, is that lots and lots of people are hurting in the state right now, and lots more, I’m afraid, are about to start hurting and telling someone I told you so about an election is not going to help anything.
What will help is trying to truly understand. What people are going through and then move from there. And community solutions are effective. Sometimes they’re the most effective. So while we are absolutely going to chip away at the federal level, at the state level, at the county level, you can absolutely make an impact in your own local community.
Go find your local food pantry and volunteer. Donate. Philanthropy alone will not solve this problem, but philanthropy will really help. The organizations like ours and, and everyone on this call who are doing this work will allow us to put more resources into the important work and use your voice, advocate, learn, and be open to listening and learning new things.
[00:52:56] Eric Miller: That’s wonderful. Empathy is one of the most powerful tools we have. Thank you all so much for the work that you do, taking the time to chat with us today, and like I said before, you can find any resources in the link of the description and have a wonderful rest of your day.
If you enjoyed this episode and the previous discussions we’ve had on this podcast, please consider donating to the Maine Policy Review by visiting the journal’s website linked in the description. Our team comprises Barbara Harrity and Joyce Rumery, co-editors of Maine Policy Review. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center.
Thanks to faculty associate Kathryn Swacha, professional writing consultant, Maine Policy Matters writer Amanda Levesque, and podcast producer, editor, and writer Jayson Heim. Thanks to Nathanael Batson for composing our podcast music. Check out mcslibrary.org to learn more about Margaret Chase Smith, the Library and Museum and Education and Public Policy.
The Maine Policy Matters website can be found in the description of this episode. Along with all materials referenced in this episode as well, a full transcript and social media links. You can give the team your topic suggestions and recommendations by filling out the form at the bottom of our webpage, and remember to follow the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Thank you for listening.