At our August 26, 2024 Rotary Club Meeting, Don Wolfe provided the inspiration based on an old Cherokee story:
An old Cherokee told his grandson: “My son, there is a battle of two wolves inside each of us. One wolf is evil. It represents anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, inferiority and ego. The other wolf is good. It represents joy, peace, love, hope humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.”
The boy thought about it and asked, “Which wolf wins”?
The old man replied: “The one you feed."
Our speakers this evening: Mandi Rothman, Chief Development Officer and Mount Vernon Rotary, and Miranda Wilson, Solutions Manager, from
Helping Hands.
Miranda discussed the following:
Helping Hands Food Bank has 6 locations throughout Skagit County, from Marble Mount to Anacortes, and includes Hamilton, with main distribution in Sedro-Woolley, Burlington, and on the Swinomish tribal lands.
They have a program called Mobile Food. The program serves 300 to 500 homebound seniors or people who are unable to leave their homes and visit one of the distribution locations. We ensure that they have the foods that they need to remain healthy in their homes, so those are delivered straight to their door once a week.
They have another program called Chow. Chow stands for Cutting Hunger On the Weekends. The Chow program serves over 1,000 children across Skagit County.
They deliver bags of food straight to the children's doors. That program was created with the help of counselors and schools coming to them to address the issue of many children going to school hungry. We know that's an issue. We know that being hungry at school makes it so hard to learn and focus on why you are there. With many dedicated volunteer hours and being able to source the food for a much lower cost, the Helping Hands has been able to expand Chow to children across Skagit County. There is no stigma on taking food home after school. It has been a real learning experience to see all these children not going without.
You'll hear Helping Hands refer to themselves as a No-barrier Food Bank. What that means is that anybody who seeks our services can receive them. They offer a service, they're not there to judge or make further barriers to the services that are needed.
Miranda works with families that that have a really hard time asking for help and there are so many barriers to services. You don't have the right ID, or you know you're undocumented, or you make a dollar too much, or whatever.
Her job as the Solutions Manager is a bit different than the food distribution that she was talking about. Her job includes finding out the why. Why does this person need the food bank? What other services may they need? Are they able to go through this on their own with a slight referral or do they need some extra help?
Their street outreach program is funded by a business owner in Skagit County. They pay one of the staff members to go out and find out the why, and address issues that the people that are living unhoused are going through.
They are all certified for DSHS, so they can sign people up for benefits right at Helping Hands.
They offer notary services, which got started during Covid. She became a notary because they were seeing a lot of people who were becoming ill and unable to leave their house, they needed power of attorney, they needed documents notarized, and there was nobody else doing it. They continue to offer that service.
Grocery Rescue is the program where they go to all the local stores and rescue food from farmers and everywhere. They go through boxes and boxes of produce, and have dedicated volunteers that go through every single strawberry that comes in. Their theory is, if they won't eat it, they don't expect anybody else to. They'll pick out all the things that are questionable and put it outside, and have farmers that come and pick it up and feed it to their livestock.
They have 2 free pantries in Sedro-Woolley including one at the high school. That pantry is all year round. It is outside. It is manned by the leadership team at Sedro-Woolley High School. Students come and pick up food from Helping Hands, and they keep that stocked for those people who may be missing their food bank hours, or just need that little bit of extra help that one time. They have a miniature Helping Hands building, the little red building, at the Parks and Rec. building in Burlington. The pantries are free 24 hours a day, and they keep them stocked. They do ask, if community members are in the area, could they drop off non-perishable items. Items are always welcome and needed.
Mandi then presented:
She just came to Helping Hands 2 months ago. She was the CEO of United Way and was passionate about what they did. When she was at United Way, she moved the Skagit County Diaper Bank into Helping Hands which were the ones who increased access
to East County residents for diapers, wipes, and formula. These things become very difficult when you're a new parent and rising costs keep skyrocketing. Parents have to choose between diapers for their kids and nutritious food or keeping the lights on.
In 2023 they distributed 3.4 million pounds of food here in Skagit County with a very small staff. The number of visits throughout all 6 locations was over 274,000. Instead of counting individual community members (people will come more than once), they look at visits and repeat visits for families. They found that it's not just people who are below the Federal poverty level. It's our paraeducators in our schools with rising costs. It's the barista at our favorite coffee shop. It's the first responder that is coming and helping us when tragedy happens, and they are taking such great care of us, but they're still having a hard time keeping their head above water. Here in Skagit County alone, an estimated 40% of our community members have a difficult time affording basic needs. That's a huge number when only about 11% are below the Federal poverty level.
29% have jobs and are called ALICE families: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. With rising costs, they're having a hard time just making ends meet. Helping Hands helps them make ends meet by connecting, not just with food, but with weatherization services for their home or PSE energy assistance, or getting a break on their property taxes each year. Their solutions team is their magic, and they help people navigate those very difficult systems.
Helping Hands is more than a food bank because it's the solutions that families need within our community. It's our investment into making our community a lot stronger. It's like a miniature Costco in there, and they would love to show it off to Rotary. They just released their
impact report from last year so please check that out. It's got some amazing stuff in it.
Mandi addressed most of the questions and answers.
They are a 501(c) and they work extra hard to make sure that they receive funding that allows them to continue being in a non-barrier food bank.
There are different rules for some of the different programs. They're working towards having diversion funds that will help people stay in their homes.
Their food distribution would never accept any funding or anything that would limit you to only serve this demographic or this income bracket. They keep it open to everybody. A lot of people in Skagit County may not qualify for food stamps, they may not qualify for a lot of benefits. Yet, one set of tires may make them go hungry that month. That's the reality of our community.
Helping Hands gets food for a much lower cost and has volunteers who are willing to donate their time. The Sedro-Woolley Rotary is great about coming in and helping pack bags. They come into the big open warehouse where there's expansive room and they put bags together for their communities.
Any child that identifies as being food insecure and is school age, 3 to 18, qualifies for simple sign-up for the program. Helping Hands understands that the stigmas run deep.
You just put your 1st name, your address, that you want it delivered, and how many children of what ages, and you're on the list, and you're getting weekend food deliveries.
They have a food distribution at the Inspire church in La Connor. That's separate from their CHOW and mobile food distribution.
Helping Hands works super hard not to duplicate services, rather, they fill the gaps.
They work closely with a lot of partners. They get the most calls from the sheriffs about needing assistance because they're receiving 911 calls. They work closely with Fire District 13 which has an amazing Cares program, and which identifies a lot of new needs that FD13 can't help with. FD13 reaches out to Helping Hands, and they're able to help FD13 with that.
During Covid, it was super hard for food banks across Skagit County and beyond to source food and to have it consistently. They helped La Conner Food Bank and different food banks across Skagit County to fill that gap. They're willing to assist as long as the community is getting what they're what they need. That's their primary concern.
From the perspective of the long term, many years out, what would make the most impact in bringing down the scale of the need? Definitely housing.
They see a lot of people stuck in that income bracket of $25 too much for anything. You don't qualify to get $200 worth of food stamps if you’re $25 over, or you’re $25 over for medical and your medical is $700 a month. The new saying is "the math ain't math". We're talking about these people $25 over, and they're paying $1,000 out of pocket for being $25 over in terms of income.
There isn't enough housing for people that can afford it. People on fixed incomes are our highest population of unhoused right now and that is seniors in Skagit County. Did you know there are over 600 people documented within the coordinated income system as being unhoused in Skagit County? That number is not going down, and those are only the ones that are self-identifying, calling 211, doing all the steps. If there's 600 that are documented in there, can you imagine how many really exist?
Talk to your elected officials. Helping Hands does a ton of advocating every time officials give Mandy an ear, and Mandy lets them know what she is seeing. For people on fixed incomes, officials raise benefits 5%, but across the board, the cost of living went up 23%. Again, the math isn't happening, right? We have seniors who are being priced out of their homes and living in their cars in the front seat with their walkers in the passenger seat.
About 20% of the cost of a house is permitting and regulatory things. Skagit County had one of the lowest vacancy rates in the State during the pandemic and Washington had just about the worst housing vacancy market in the nation.
People who are living in supported housing projects throughout the county may be ready to live independently on their own. But there's nowhere for them to go, and when they can't move on, then someone who needs that space that they're in can't move into it.
A coalition called Ahash (Alternative Housing Alliance) gets together every 2 weeks and talks about alternative types of housing such as room sharing or ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units) on people's property.
When you are in front of your elected officials, let them know you're paying attention to this issue.
Children should be worried about what they're going to be wearing to their 1st day of school, not where they're going to take a shower, who's going to tease them because they're dirty, or where they're going to go after school, or any of those things.
A brief little story about caring and solutions.
Helping Hands got a phone call from a hospital social worker. There's a man in there dying from kidney failure with 2 weeks left to live who has nowhere to go. The hospital doesn't know how to help. Helping Hands contacts every agency that may be able to help and no reason to help from other agencies, since nowhere to go.
Helping Hand stepped in and was able to get him into a motel and he was able to get connected with Hospice. Hospice literally was going to be going to his truck, without a camper or anything, that's just the front seat of his truck, and doing their process there.
If you get home tonight and you think “Oh, my gosh! I thought about that, and this might be an option”, please do feel free to reach out to Miranda because she is super curious about how we can do more. 360-630-0389, miranda@helpinghandsfoodbank.org
Helping Hands partners with a program called Essentials. Essentials is primarily in Renton, Seattle, and the big cities, and provides non-food items like feminine hygiene, laundry, soap, and toilet paper. Miranda advocated and was able to show the need for Essentials to come to help Helping Hands.
Essentials’ first program responds to the floods. Essentials provides Helping Hands special kits so that they can take them out to those families in primarily East County, and provide those a distribution at each of their locations once a month. Families can come and get all those basic necessities.
Helping Hands has solar on the roof to make their dollar stretch as far as possible. They have an acre of community garden that's fully organic and self-sufficient. People can come out and pick whenever they want.
Audrey concluded: “There is so much good work going on in our community, and sometimes we don't know the intimate details of it, but that was an excellent presentation. Thank you very much.”
We sang Happy Birthday to Patsy Good.
The Martin Light award for Marty means a lot to her.
Our gold sponsor, PSE, representative Rosie wrote Audrey to express gratitude for being inviting, and their pleasure at being part of the event.
Other comments included that the dessert dash table was the best ever.
Audrey’s closing remarks:
What is the Rotary Foundation endowment fund?
- Gifts to the endowment, ensure that rotary members will have the resources they need to design and implement sustainable projects year after year.
- Donations to the endowment can be made as an outright gift or a planned gift, such as a bequest in your estate. As of 2022-23, Rotary's endowment totals US 678.6 million, and has further commitments of 947 million - people who have advised the endowment that they are leaving something in their will for them.
- Contributions to this fund are invested for the future. Only current earnings from the investments are used to support foundation programs.
People's generosity does good in the world in perpetuity.
Volunteering is Audrey’s theme this year.
“Volunteering is an act of heroism on a grand scale, and it matters profoundly.”
That is a quote from Shabana Basij-Rasikh, an Afghan educator, humanitarian, and women's rights champion. She is the founder of HELA, Inc., and School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA).
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Service Above Self
Mount Vernon, WA 98273
United States of America