A food bank goes broke

Barring a pot at the end of the rainbow, the Portland Community Food and Nutrition Program is going under

by Sam Pfeifle

BANKER: Skip Matson's running out of coin.

Skip Matson has waged a lot battles through his long years in Maine. "I've been an advocate for longer than I care to remember," says the 58-year-old Portland resident who's been in the West End since 1961. Among his David-and-Goliath routines have been skirmishes with Central Maine Power and New England Telephone to keep rates from skyrocketing. He spearheaded the effort to get food stamps back to thousands squeezed out by Maine State Housing in 1995. He even got Time Warner to lower cable rates for the poor and the elderly.

"It's up to people like me," Matson says of watching out for the everyman. "One of the problems is that people aren't aware of the problem and they don't know how to help."

A year and a half back, just before Thanksgiving, Matson came across his latest cause: the food needs of the elderly folks he regularly defends. With the initial support of the Neighborhood Action Committee, a Greater Portland advocacy group where he once served as director, Matson filed a grant application through the Federal Administration for Children and Families, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and started his own one-man food bank, the Portland Community Food and Nutrition Program. It is that $50,000 grant -- used to buy food from Good Shepherd, cover his liability and health insurance, pay his bookkeeper, and a provide a modest salary for his 50+ hours of work weekly -- that got him started helping roughly 50 families, generally elderly shut-ins at first (he now makes monthly deliveries to over 800 families). And it is that grant, or the lack there of, that threatens to shut his program down. The ACF grant runs out at the end of September, and the Portland Community Food and Nutrition Program "bare bones, can only scrape through for another three months," according to Matson, without a significant infusion of cash. Matson's chances at a renewal, say observers, are not good.

Matson has done quite a bit with that initial chunk of ACF cash, first installing himself in a Youth in Action-donated 20 x 20 room above Fresh Approach on Brackett Street. "I've got a Muslim group on one side, and the Latter Day Saints on the other," he jokes. "So I must be getting help from somewhere up above."

He's also used the money to grow PCFNP to include 803 families, with nearly 2000 total recipients as of July 31. He has given out 148,084 pounds of food, with a retail value of $256,353.63. He purchases food from the Good Shepherd food bank in Lewiston at 14 cents a pound and has had some food donated by private companies and through food drives.

"I never realized that people went hungry in this town until I started this," Matson says. "They say the economy is good, but who's the economy good for? There's always people who are in need of a hand, people who try and try to just get to that first rung of the ladder, and as soon as they get 10 cents more than the government thinks they should have, they take that 10 cents out of their food stamps."

Matson's application for a second year of funding through the Administration for Children and Families has not been approved. "We review and score [the applications] according to a criteria," explains Cathy Rivers at ACF. The process is outlined in a bureaucratic nightmare of a document that gives points for everything from how well an applicant describes the targeted area, to the benefit the reviewer perceives will result in the community, to "management history" and "staffing skills."

"We award grants in rank order," says Rivers, "funding down the list until we run out of money." It is a competitive process, only about 50 out of 260 applications are granted, and this year Matson's score, in the mid-70s, is well below the mid-90s cutoff for established programs. There is a chance that more money will be released by Congress to fund more applications, but Matson isn't holding his breath. "Funds would have to be awarded by the 30th of September," Rivers answers when asked about Matson's chances. "He will receive notice by then."

Without a renewal, Matson will be dependent on private donations and fundraisers. In an attempt to ward off the impending shut-down, Matson put together the program's first newsletter in June, sending information about the program to the Maine congressional delegation, as well as possible contributors. Representatives from John Baldacci's and Tom Allen's offices have responded, but are unsure what they can provide.

"We'll do everything we can," says Doug Dunbar in Baldacci's Bangor office. "Ned Porter [one of Baldacci's aides] is going to work on it when he gets back to Washington. It's been brought to his attention, and we'll do everything we can."

Mark Sullivan, a representative of Tom Allen's office, echoes those sentiments. "We'll do everything we can to see if they can revisit the score," he says. "But it's going to be awfully hard." Sullivan says they plan to investigate alternative funding sources as well. "Programs like Skip's shouldn't rise or fall on the funding of one program."

What makes PCFNP different from others, and what would make it hard to replace, is that it is not an emergency food program, only there for the days when the cupboard is absolutely bare. Rather, it is just what it says, a food and nutrition program that each month provides families with a box of food along with discounted prices on meat and fresh produce at Fresh Approach. The discounts allow many people to stretch their food stamps, get nutritious food for the money they do have, and the program even educates them on eating habits with material from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension Program.

And the "families" the program helps come in all shapes and sizes. "We've got AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] mothers," Matson begins to count off, "people with families who are working, people who've had their food stamps cut, young mothers going back to school, people with and recovering from substance-abuse problems."

Natalie Ladd is a single mother of two young girls who has been making use of the program for the past six months. Because of the program, she writes in a letter of support, she is "able to buy wonderful, fresh meats that my children will eat." And she notes that unlike other agencies that help her, at PCFNP she can control the size, type, and amount of food she spends her money on, as well as "walk away with many extras that I could never afford."

Laurie Bickford, a mother of four, echoes Ladd's sentiments. "In April, my husband lost his job," she writes. "When I reached out to human services in my area, I received a one-time voucher for $125, and four cans of applesauce from their food pantry. We filled out paperwork for [PCFNP] and qualified, and we had our food no problem, and in conjunction with Fresh Approach we purchased meats . . . . I depended on this program for four to five months. It was there when we needed it, and it should be there for other people and families, too."

Matson has even enlisted the help of one of his old adversaries, Time Warner Cable, during the course of PCFNP's rapid growth. "Time Warner has been a great help to me," says Matson, "which is a surprise because in my advocacy days I went up against them all the time trying to get them to lower their rates." It seems Time Warner took a shine to Matson while he represented those who couldn't afford their rate increases.

"Skip's points were always well taken," says Kim Cannon, Time Warner's vice president of marketing and public affairs, of Matson's tirades against the cable giant. "We used his ideas in establishing our policies." And that, apparently isn't hollow rhetoric. "We had a senior citizen discount, and we got a lot of heck from it because some seniors didn't need it," she explains, watching her tongue. "[Because of Skip's advocacy] we introduced the Lifeline Service, so that not just elderly, but everybody can get affordable cable."

Time Warner has donated a computer to PCFNP, funded a staff person to help Matson with the program's day-to-day operations, and they have their cable techs helping with deliveries. That's right, next time the cable guy's late, remember that he may be making a food delivery to someone having a rough time of it.

"The techs love it," insists Cannon. "It makes them feel so good, and it helps them get to know the neighborhoods." One Time Warner tech, Reggie Brown, even organized the recent "King's in the House" fundraiser at the Reiche School across from Fresh Approach. His Motown revival show, coupled with the work of Robert "Elvis" Washington, an Elvis impersonator, raised over $1000 for PCFNP.

Neither Time Warner nor well-meaning fundraisers, however, can fund PCFNP's yearly budget. But Matson remains positive. "So far it's come together," he says. "I don't know what will happen this time, but someone will come from somewhere -- they always do." Then he becomes more contemplative, "Though this is the worst we've been off since the start."

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com.