Courtesy YMCA
A food program participant gets a brown bag lunch from a YMCA volunteer in August (left). Thousands of bag lunches were prepared as the YMCA increased its program from the East Y only to eight sites in Dane County.
The pandemic has created new roles for many, and the YMCA of Dane County is no exception. Before COVID-19 hit, the YMCA was not involved in food access for the most part. The organization served some meals as part of its childcare programs and ran a limited brown bag lunch for kids out of the Madison East Y on Cottage Grove Road.
Now the organization is providing brown bag meals for hundreds of kids and seniors, has created a mobile food pantry, and is serving more meals through its regular and emergency child care programs.
“Last spring when everything shut down, we jumped in,” says Jen Kruel, the YMCA’s vice president for development and marketing. “When COVID came, things bubbled up very fast.”
The Y saw that kids who depended on school meal programs were missing meals, and many seniors were not able to go to meal pickup sites or did not feel safe grocery shopping. “We said okay, let’s put all of our resources into this,” Kruel says, “even though we didn’t really have a system or process [set up] to this magnitude. It was kind of a trial by fire.”
Immediately the Y increased the number of its brown bag meals and the number of distribution sites. From March through May, meals were served at eight sites in Dane County; now it’s three. From March to December, the Y provided 29,827 brown bag meals.
“We were struggling for manpower ourselves,” Kruel recalls, “and we were spending a lot of time putting 1,000 brown bag individual meals together, and for the first time ordering massive amounts of food, and not wanting any of it to go to waste. It took a couple of months to get that system down.”
In summer, as schools started to once again provide meals to kids, the Y refocused its program to three sites serving breakfast and lunch in a drive-through or pickup.
The Y also added mobile food pantries. At first, they tried an online reservation system for pickups. Now it uses a drive-up model that provides 65 pounds of food per week, per household, in contactless pickup at several locations. In 2020, the Y provided 349,180 pounds of food to 5,372 Dane County households, which they calculate amounts to more than 419,000 meals, through its food pantries.
Over the summer, a “Wacky Wednesday” program took the mobile food pantry to different neighborhoods, mostly on the north side and in Sun Prairie, along with family activities. Kruel says the Y is currently writing grants to do that again this coming summer in more neighborhoods on Madison’s east and west sides as well.
No program requires proof of need. “If you are hungry, come get this, we are here for you,” says Kruel.
In April, the Y started calling seniors in its database — seniors who had participated in its programs in the past — to check on them, let them know the food programs existed, and to ask if they needed delivery. Some of the brown bag lunches are earmarked for seniors, but “our food is either cold sandwiches or [at the food pantry] ingredients for meals that need to be cooked. So if they needed a hot meal, we got them in touch with Meals on Wheels and other agencies,” Kruel says.
“We’re worried about isolation and worried about nutrition,” says Kruel. A “Virtual Y” program, which functions like a Zoom call, is available, with coffee hours and at-home fitness programs, open to everyone but aimed especially at seniors. Another program helps smooth access to the COVID-19 vaccine for seniors. Virtual programs on fall prevention, tax preparation and the vaccine are also available.
While the contactless pickup at the mobile pantries is the safest method right now, even at the drive-through, people want to “see you, and talk, they want to tell you about their family, or their challenges, or ask questions like ‘Can you help me with rent assistance or daycare?’” says Kruel. “We are able to have conversations and get them information and point them in the right direction.”
Kruel credits partners like area churches and the Neighborhood Navigators program in Sun Prairie for helping with this work; volunteers from these groups help deliver YMCA food to those who don’t have transportation or otherwise can't get out, and spread the word that the programs exist.
The numbers of people using the Y’s food programs are holding steady, Kruel says. “The lines are not going down.”
Going forward, the Y is focused on three things: its food-for-all programs; increased child care; and seniors.
“People have stepped up,” Kruel says, although for safety reasons the Y has not publicly been asking for volunteers. “It’s been a small pool but that’s been on purpose.” But more volunteers will be needed to grow those three areas. And as the YMCA facilities themselves begin to reopen, and staffers go back to their pre-pandemic jobs, volunteers will fill in the gaps with the new programs.
“We would not be able to do any of this if it were not for volunteers,” says Kruel, “but most importantly the community has come together to help support all of these services financially. We would not be able to do that especially at this scale without that.
“This need is not going away,” she continues, “although if there’s anything we’ve learned in the last 11 months, it’s that you have to be able to turn on a dime, because needs do change.”
