HRDC's Christmas food baskets see huge demand during pandemic

District 4 Human Resources and Development Council’s Christmas food baskets appear to have been as successful as their Thanksgiving baskets, with both seeing massively increased demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Food Bank Director Alma Garcia said HRDC would, in a normal year, hand out food baskets for either Thanksgiving or Christmas and would usually serve 30 to 40 families.

However, she said, this year, thanks to funds including from the CARES Act, they were able to do both and served 265 families in total with Christmas seeing slightly more demand than Thanksgiving.

Normally, she said, they only serve the families who qualify based on the Salvation Army’s income standard, but because they had more funds they were able to serve more people who didn’t quite meet their partner’s requirements.

Larger-than-average donations from Valley Furniture in Havre, Gary & Leo’s Hometown Hunger food-drive, and a considerable influx of food donations also helped, she said.

Garcia said the amount of food the received was surprising, and she’s glad they were able to make use of it for the baskets.

“We weren’t expecting that, but the more food we can put in the boxes for the family the better,” she said.

After Thanksgiving, HRDC tried to plan for a similar spike in demand for food boxes, but COVID-19 made things difficult.

Montana Food Bank Network, which HRDC works with, recommended working with as few volunteers as possible this year to lower the risk of unintentionally spreading COVID-19, so instead they commissioned their staff to work the event when they had free time.

“We were all able to put in a few hours here and there for this project,” she said.

Garcia said this did make the event harder to run, but it was the only way they could make it work.

“This was the only option we saw,” she said.

She said they also set up a system that had families interested in receiving a basket showing up by appointment in 15 minute intervals to keep crowd size down.

Garcia said this planning paid off and did help make things easier amid a pandemic which has made everything more complicated.

She said she suspects the high demand for HRDC’s services will continue into this year as the pandemic continues.

”It’s definitely a long-term effect,” she said.

She said the role of the food bank will continue to be extremely important in the months to come and they are gearing up to keep helping as much as possible as they continue to adapt their operations to COVID-19.

Garcia said the food bank is looking toward Easter and the next food basket program they will be running along with the Salvation Army.