David Emerson: Addressing food insecurity, the mission of the East Texas Food Bank

MIKE LANDESS: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. The statistics are scary: One in seven adults goes hungry in East Texas, and that’s true for one in five children. The East Texas Food Bank serves 26 counties and provided more than 27 million meals in fiscal year 2023. The man who led the food bank for more than a dozen years, Dennis Cullinane, retired in July, and the new CEO is our guest today. Welcome, David Emerson.

DAVID EMERSON: Thank you. Glad to be here.

LANDESS: Now, you were CEO of the Midwest Food Bank before coming to East Texas, and with a lot of success there, growing the revenue to $25 million and more than doubling the number of agency partners to 100. What kinds of goals do you have at the East Texas Food Bank?

EMERSON: Certainly, we want to continue to serve our rural communities. Such a great need out in the rural areas of East Texas, and so that’s not going to go away anytime soon. We want to address food insecurity as it relates to health initiatives and so really want to build stronger partnerships with a lot of our health partners in the area to address, you know, especially in the rural areas. I mean, there’s just a vacuum around health, and food plays a big part in that. So really want to grow that, continue to grow with our partners and find more partners that are doing that holistic work, if you will. So, it’s not just, you know, providing them the food, but providing them the job training they need, the drug addiction counseling they may need things like that. So we really want to partner with people that can, you know, serve the whole person.

LANDESS: Reaching the most people in the most effective way.

EMERSON: Exactly.

LANDESS: Now, many East Texas children who participate in those free- and reduced-price meal programs during the week, face hunger on weekends and holidays, when those programs aren’t operating. So the East Texas Food Bank created the backpack program. Tell us more about that.

EMERSON: Yeah, so the backpack program is for those children who may be on free or reduced lunches during the week. And so on the weekends, there’s a vacuum, right, or during the holiday time periods, they don’t have that food available to them. So, this provides them some ready-made meals, pop-top meals, fruit juices, shelf-stable milk, and so the teachers or the counselors on the school campuses are doing an assessment on who needs those foods, and so we’re able to provide that. So, they have that food to carry them through the weekend and come back on Monday, and they can get back into the meal program at the school.

LANDESS: That program is underway right now?

EMERSON: That is true; yes, underway.

LANDESS: We’ll talk a little bit about that later on. Some 237,000 meals in 2023, fiscal 2023, that’s amazing. Now, with your experience, are there any particular needs that you’ve identified that will become targeted priorities in the near future?

EMERSON: I mean, we have rapid growth, right? I mean going on right now. I mean, we’re opening a resource center in Longview that will serve the Longview community in the off hours, if you will, so for people to come in the evenings, people to come on the weekends, so most of our pantry partners aren’t open during those times, and so we’re trying to fill that gap. We’ve recently opened one in Lufkin. We’ll be opening one in Tyler here soon, and then Texarkana is also in our jurisdiction and so we’ll be opening one there sometime next year.

LANDESS: How difficult is that in terms of gathering the people together and the facilities and resources that you’ll need locally for each of those? What all is involved in that?

EMERSON: Certainly funding. Certainly, we need the resources to purchase the facilities or renovate the facilities, hire the staff, things like that, do all the training, and we’ve had great partners come along and help us in those areas, and so it’s really the sustainability that we’ll be looking to address as we serve those communities. Some of those communities that we’re moving into, they’re the larger communities in our jurisdiction, and some of them are the highest need. So, Bowie County, for example, in Texarkana, one of our highest-need counties and the outlying counties around. And so it’s really going to help us be able to serve those areas more. So, along those lines, certainly funding volunteers in those communities as well, we always need those there as well as here. We always need volunteers. Volunteers are the lifeblood of what we do. Last year, we had over 30,000 volunteer hours in our Tyler facility. If I had to pay for that, it would have cost me over a million dollars to pay people. You know, my employees to do that and so definitely helps us, you know, make the dollar go a lot further.

LANDESS: A lot of folks who may be listening to this conversation may have no context for the problems of food insecurity. They’ve never faced it personally. How do you get past that when you’re trying to garner community support for what the East Texas Food Bank does?

EMERSON: I mean it’s education, right? I mean a lot of us — I think the pandemic certainly changed it for a lot of people. So a lot of people now probably understand food insecurity a little more, because the lines got really long. And so it wasn’t just people who had, you know, it was a lot of people who had never been to a food pantry or stood in line to get food before, were all of a sudden in that need because their jobs had changed, they were laid off or they couldn’t go out to work or whatever the case may be. So, we saw, you know, a lot of increase in that. But in that we also saw people begin to understand that, OK, this can happen to anybody on any given day, and so, while it may have never happened to me or you personally or some of the people listening to it, I think the knowledge and the awareness of everyone certainly became more in light in that. And so, you know, for us, if it’s a federal program or something along those lines that we may be, like our senior programs, then there’s qualifications that people have to meet to be in those and so. But outside of that, if people are in need of food, then you know, it’s our job just to make sure they have the food available to them and to not necessarily, you know, judge whether they need it or not, right, and so we just try to provide that food for them and, again, partner with our local partner agencies to, you know, make those definitions on, you know, who qualifies and who doesn’t.

LANDESS: How do you go about garnering the resources for that food?

EMERSON: So, we purchase some of it. We certainly have a lot of donated food, you know. We are part of Feeding America, and they coordinate with a lot of the grocery stores and grocery chains around the country to provide access to food for us. We certainly have some purchasing programs that are made available to us through some federal dollars and things like that, but then we’re also always doing food drives. We always need businesses to do food drives for us or school districts to do food drives for us, things like that, so that we always have, you know, food available to us. You know it’s the… We’re blessed to give a lot of produce out. We have a focus on giving nutritious food, and so, as you know, food is medicine, and so we have, you know, a team of nutritionists that are going out teaching people about the importance of what they’re eating and teaching them how to cook some of the food that they may not ever have an experience having cooked it before or having eaten it before, and so we’re really trying to up that educational level of what we’re providing to the community. And so, meat, protein, all those things, type of foods, we tend to have to buy all of that.

LANDESS: Any final thoughts you’d like to share with our listeners?

EMERSON: I’m happy to be here. I grew up in south Arkansas, and my wife grew up in north Louisiana, and so the tie to being back in East Texas is a part of the culture that we were used to and grew up in. And, again, my passion is around serving the rural areas, having grown up in one, and so I’ve just seen the need and just thrilled to be back a part of this community and being able to address that.

LANDESS: Our guest has been the new CEO of the East Texas Food Bank, David Emerson. To hear this conversation again or to share it, go to KVUT. org. There you’ll also find a link where you can support the backpack program. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.