Helping Neighbors: Who Needs The Family Pantry? People From All Walks Of Life

Who are the clients of the Family Pantry of Cape Cod? If you’ve never been to a food pantry, it’s not who you might think.

The people who serve you in stores and restaurants, the people who clean your teeth or take your blood at the lab, the people who keep your lawn tidy, and many others rely on the Family Pantry to defray the high cost of groceries each month, helping them to stay on the Cape. And that sustains the local economy.

“These are people, you would not consider them poor under normal conditions,” Pantry Executive Director Christine Menard said. “But on the Cape, it’s very, very expensive.” Many clients of the Family Pantry are working more than one job and trying to support families.

“We have teachers, we have nurses, we have gardeners, we have cashiers, we have dry cleaning people,” she said. While hunger is obviously a problem for these families, they’re just as often struggling with the high cost of paying rent or a mortgage.

“If they’re putting all their money into housing, then we end up helping out with the food. It’s just about every walk of life in this building right now,” she said.

According to a federal study, there are around 16,000 people on Cape Cod who suffer from food insecurity, or not knowing where their next meal is coming from. The Family Pantry reaches about 86 percent of those people, Menard said. “That’s a pretty staggering number, out of 225,000 people that live here year-round,” she said. If not for the Family Pantry, thousands of people would be going hungry, which would have a devastating human toll — particularly on children and elders.

But it would also be crippling to the local economy if the Family Pantry were to go away.

“It allows a lot of the local workers to stay here,” Menard said. A family of four can get between six and nine bags of groceries every time they visit the Family Pantry, saving them more than $300. “If they’ve got to live here and work here, and they can’t afford to, then I’m guessing that this is how they’re making ends meet,” she said.

Because the Family Pantry tracks how many times clients visit, “we know that they only come when they have to,” Menard said. Fewer than 2 percent of clients come every time they’re allowed to. “We can see it. When there’s work to be had, there’s a dip here. When there’s no work to be had, it goes through the roof.”

To contribute to The Chronicle's Helping Neighbors campaign, visit CapeCodChronicle.com and click Helping Neighbors under “more” on the menu bar. You can also mail a tax-deductible contribution to The Family Pantry, 133 Queen Anne Rd., Harwich, MA 02645, or call 508-432-6519 to donate by credit card.