Recognizing a Problem
By Kienan O'Doherty
An issue woke Delaware County up and made them realize that this affected them too.
The issue at hand is a demon that is spreading nationwide - food insecurity.
What separates the county apart from others, however, is the awareness and effort being put into solving this issue.
“After around six conversations with about 100 community members, we recognized that we do in fact have a food insecurity issue [in the county],” Barb Lyon, Vice President of United Way, says.
In 2012, nearly 18,000 people in Delaware County were considered food insecure, Lyon says. Now, that number has dropped to just over 16,000, but a remarkable number-46 percent, or nearly 7.500 are children, according to feedingamerica.org.
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“We had a bigger food insecure population than some whole counties’ population, if that makes sense,” Lyon said.
Despite recognizing the problems and working to alleviate hunger, the food insecurity population of Delaware County is still larger than the total populations of Harrison (15,307), Morgan (14,804), Noble (14,294), Monroe (14,210), and Vinton (12,921) counties, respectively.
At the forefront, United Way of Delaware County and the Delaware General Health District created the Delaware County Hunger Alliance to continue to seek solutions.
The alliance is a collaboration of many organizations, including government faith-based, Ohio Wesleyan University, United Way, and other community groups.
“The alliance is committed to growing our local capacity to serve our community in an efficient and collective way that honors the intent of our donors and the dignity of our clients. We use innovation and strategy to collectively address the need” United Way’s website said.
“When we first started looking at the numbers and looking around, we were only bringing in around 500,000 pounds of food into the community to address the food insecure,” Lyon says. “And now we’re over 1.5 million pounds of food being distributed through our food pantry network, backpack programs, and produce markets.”
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"The need for food jumped from 1/2 million pounds a year to 1.5 million pounds"