Every weekday afternoon, Jenny DeVivo restocks the free food pantry the Boys & Girls Club of Martha’s Vineyard opened two years ago with fresh produce, meat and ready-made meals for families in need.
With a line forming out the door, she distributes donations from farms, rescued food, discounted items from Costco and Ocean State Job Lot, and 200 meals a day to students and their families in her after-school program.
“Most of our residents who lived here year-round are struggling not only to find housing but to put food on the table,” said DeVivo, who also runs a larger food pantry twice a week at a club in Edgartown.
Martha’s Vineyard is best known outside the island as a wealthy summer home base, a playground for the rich and famous who live in increasingly large homes built on vast seaside estates, but there are very few year-round residents and workers who live in its glamorous reality.
“Spending $600 a week at Stop & Shop is a struggle,” said one of the club’s 350 members, who are trying to feed single-parent families. She asked not to be named because she didn’t want her name in the paper. The free meals “help us a lot,” she said.
“The Vineyard had a lot of low-income people who struggled in the winter, but now the Vineyard population is growing and I think that’s why the need has increased,” she added.
In fact, one in four year-round residents, or 5,200 out of 20,530 people, are registered at the Island Grown Initiative (IGI) free food distribution center, the largest on the island.
While not all enrollees use the IGI Pantry regularly, the number who have done so has quadrupled in five years, from 678 in January 2019 to 2,753 in January of this year. That number continues to grow, with 106 new people signing up for the pantry in May.
A third of those served are seniors and children. Many of the rest are working adults and day laborers struggling to make ends meet.
Through its prepared meals program, IGI distributed 2,304 frozen meals in 2018. This will jump to 40,797 meals in 2022, an increase of 1,670 percent. The team plans to produce and distribute 60,000 meals this year to meet growing demand.
“Do we want those numbers to go down? Absolutely,” said IGI board chair Gail Arnold. “We don’t want people to use pantries. We want to go out of business like that. I don’t think there’s anyone in the food equity world who would say they’re going to go out of business anytime soon.”
Island experts say there’s no single explanation for the increase, but given inflation, rising food prices and other economic pressures since the pandemic began, more families are struggling to get through a week without the extra food they receive from the island’s half-dozen or so food banks.
“If you’re food insecure, you can go to five or six places and not be turned away, which is a wonderful thing, frankly, but it’s unfortunate that that’s the status quo, considering our island paradise,” Arnold said.
The IGI Food Pantry, based at the Portuguese American Club of Oak Bluffs, is open Mondays from 2 to 4 p.m., Wednesdays from 1 to 6 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon and Fridays for seniors from noon to 2 p.m. On Thursdays, 14 drivers will deliver food, dry goods and other items to those who are unable to leave their homes.
Merrick Carreiro, IGI’s director of food equity, and about six volunteers unpack roughly 7,000 pounds of food they receive for free or at a discount from the Greater Boston Food Bank every Tuesday and the first Monday of each month.
She also stocks her fridge and shelves with fruits and vegetables from IGI’s 40-acre farm, chicken and eggs donated by Slough Farm, and bread purchased from Grey Barn and Iggy’s Bread.
To meet the increased demand, the food pantry will be relocating to a new facility at 114 Dukes County Road in early August. The new food pantry will have larger refrigerators and freezers, more storage space to stockpile food in case ferries are canceled, and a drive-thru system to make pickup easier. Seniors can still shop in person.
The new project is backed primarily by the Bank of Martha’s Vineyard, but the CARES Act, the federal stimulus bill aimed at combating the economic fallout from the pandemic, ends this month for IGI. The company has received just under $2 million over the past three years and now wants to ramp up fundraising efforts to top that up.
“The island needs to support the people who come to the food pantry because they are in the services that run this place,” Carreiro said.
Indeed, the increased demand on the island reflects deepening challenges across the state: The Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB) recently reported that nearly one in three Massachusetts adults, or 1.9 million people, will face food insecurity by the end of 2023, up 100,000 from the previous year. The food bank cited “exorbitant living costs, rising food prices and the end of pandemic-era assistance” as reasons for the figure.
Other programs across the island have also seen a dramatic increase in demand.
Serving Hands, a program run by the Vineyard Hunger Committee, delivers food to 80 people on the island and plans to deliver to 20 to 40 more people in the summer when the island gets busier, said Alicia Nicholson, chairwoman of the committee.
“Since the pandemic, we’ve seen an increase in that number, especially during the winter months,” she said. “The need is much greater.”
In January and February of this year, Food Baskets MV, also known as the Good Shepherd Parish Food Pantry, saw 200 people visit in one day.
“These 200 people represent families of up to six people,” said Sarah Steigelman, outreach distributor for the program.
A few years ago, up to 70 to 75 customers would come through the doors every Tuesday and every other Saturday when the pantry was open.
Grace Church in Vineyard Haven began its community supper program at least 30 years ago, held every Friday from November through the end of March, said Heather Laveling, parish administrator.
The program uses church funds to prepare hot meals from Stop & Shop, Cash & Carry and other grocery stores, and also accepts donations.
Two winters ago, they fed between 60 and 80 people, LaBell said. Last year, that number grew to 85 to closer to 95, before peaking at 150 this winter.
To meet demand, the church plans to launch a new program this fall: a community fridge stocked with vegan foods will be open 24 hours a day outside the church building.
Marjorie Pierce, outreach coordinator for the Community Dinner Program at First Congregational Church of West Tisbury, has also seen an increase in attendance: Before the pandemic, the church would host a sit-down dinner for 80 people; now, it feeds closer to 150, with transportation provided.
She said it’s difficult to accommodate sit-down meals in church halls. “We have a wide range of people, from elderly people who can no longer cook for themselves to people who are homeless,” Pierce said.
The age group served by the Council on Aging food pantries ranges from mostly senior citizens to seasonal workers in Edgartown, said Lindsay Famalis, the council’s board president.
“The need is much greater. It goes beyond just boxes of cereal and rice. What’s really needed is everything from soup to nuts,” Famalis said.
They receive food deliveries from GBFB once a month, but “it often runs out soon after it is delivered,” she added.
Two years ago, the West Tisbury Library launched its Community Fridge program (so named because it’s a refrigerator full of free food). Just inside the front door are refrigerators and shelves stocked with donated produce, canned goods, dairy products, personal care items and cleaning supplies that are available to everyone.
The fridge is filled each week with private donations, food rescued from Cronig’s Market, produce from Slough Farm and pre-prepared frozen meals from IGI. Library Director Alexandra Pratt said the program feeds more than 250 people a week.
“This is a true community effort,” Pratt said, “It takes a whole village to feed a village.”
More people are using the library’s fridges each year, but Pratt said this could be due to greater awareness and exposure of the fridges, as well as the fact that “as housing prices rise, more people are struggling to feed themselves and their families.”
Pratt said she often hears stories of people, from “starving” kids who need a snack to perk them up during story time to people living in their cars, saying Freege is a lifeline.
In January, Pratt spoke to lawmakers and library officials at CLAMS Legislative Library Day on Cape Cod about a woman whose home she had lived in for years was sold and turned into a weekly rental. [she] We were camping in the state forest.”
“She came to us crying and said she didn’t know how she would have eaten if she hadn’t gotten food from the library,” Pratt added.
