If a person doesn’t have enough to eat or doesn’t know where their next meal will come from, they are considered food insecure. According to Feeding South Dakota, over 130,000 South Dakotans face hunger and 1 in 5 are children.
Every week you’ll find a dedicated group of volunteers filling several bags with food at Avera’s wellness pantry hub in Sioux Falls.
“We packed 100 bags many times in one session. There’s milk in there, cereal, pudding, vegetables, fruit, it satisfies a whole family with a meal,” said volunteer, Sioux Falls Post 15, American Legion, Al Arndt.
Thanks to a partnership with Feeding South Dakota, food is delivered here weekly. Once bags are filled, they will be going to patients who need an emergency food source.
Determining Food Insecurity
“We have our clinic staff ask two questions, if you have enough money to buy food or if you’ve been worried you will run out of food. If you answer sometimes or ‘always’ to either of those questions, you’re offered one of these bags,” said Director of Rural Research at Avera Research Institute, Lacey McCormack, PhD. “In the information that we are collecting about patients, we see food insecurity between 10% and 30% of patients.”
The food insecurity rate varies by clinic. When someone doesn’t have enough food, it impacts their overall health.
“It can be harder to heal from an illness, it’s also hard to manage illnesses, if you have something like diabetes or a heart condition,” said McCormack. “In children we know that if you are hungry, it is hard to focus at school, it can also impact mental health.”
Serving a Rural Need
That’s why Avera isn’t just helping its patients in 6 Sioux Falls clinics, but also Pierre, Parkston and recently Lake Andes.
“We service patients about 60 miles around Parkston,” said President and CEO of Avera St. Benedict Health Center, Lindsay Weber. “We also operate a rural health clinic in Lake Andes which borders the Native American reservation and we recently expanded to that clinic. It’s been very eye opening and rewarding work in that clinic, we are seeing we are administering anywhere from 20-30 bags a month to individuals out of that clinic.”
Since these bags serve as an emergency food supply, each bag also includes information to refer patients to sustainable food resources, like local food pantries.
“Food insecurity does not discriminate, and I think that’s one thing that we really learned in a small community. If we are not asking the question, most likely people are not going to tell us,” said Weber.
“We’ve seen a lot of gratefulness from both patients and staff, patients are of course happy to receive these resources, especially if they have nothing at home, which we do run into, we also know that staff appreciate being able to address the issue when they see it,” said McCormack.
Looking to the Future
The wellness pantries have been in place for over a year, and McCormack says they’re hoping to grow.
“We really have a framework that we can take to Mitchell, or Iowa or Aberdeen, and so I hope to grow into all the facilities that have asked for this resource,” said McCormack.
Important work that is creating a positive impact, one bag at a time.
“What we like is the fact that it’s going to somebody in need, that’s the reason we come here,” said Arnt. “It’s part of our mission, it’s who we are at Avera, and it’s really living out that value of hospitality and compassion right when the patients enter our door,” said Weber.
Each bag contains about 12-15 pounds of food. Learn more about resources.
