Hunger grows as community fills the void
By Joe Severino, RealWV
Folks began lining up for A More Excellent Way Life Center Church’s monthly food giveaway more than three hours before it was scheduled to begin.
Bishop Robert Haley III said that around 9 a.m. he told those in line they should come back later, as their team begins handing out boxes at noon. People went away, but a permanent line formed again just after 10 a.m.
Haley pointed to the growing lines at A More Excellent Way’s monthly giveaway – typically held on a Saturday during the middle of each month – as a clear sign of increasing hunger and food insecurity in Charleston. Distributing from 250 to 300 boxes each go-around, Haley said they ran out of boxes at last month’s giveaway, which is a very rare occurrence.
By 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 15, less than a dozen boxes remained, as volunteers with A More Excellent Way ran their distribution with precision and experience. These boxes contain the usual donation items: canned goods, granola, crackers, ramen and boxed foods, but they also have leaflets for how to sign up for health insurance, or where to seek other benefits. Haley said this is a more holistic approach to improving health in their community.
“People don’t realize how hard things are for folks right now,” said Haley, who leads A More Excellent Way, which is located in the Five Corners intersection on the city’s West Side. The federal government’s slashing of pandemic-era social safety net benefits has set financials of many families back as the cost of food and medicine has skyrocketed over the last year.
It’s been easy for well-off folks to dismiss the needs of these residents, Haley said, but if you ask anyone on the ground what they’ve been seeing around them, they’ll tell you that things are getting worse.
“People out here are struggling,” said Jennifer Walls, working the food giveaway. Walls is from Clarksburg, but currently resides at Recovery Point on the West Side. Recovery Point’s Charleston location is a 100-bed long-term recovery facility for women.
Since Recovery Point uses their church for meetings, Haley said they return the favor by having the women in recovery work their food giveaways. Walls said she enjoys getting outside and working to better her new community.
“It makes me feel better, because I’m out here helping,” she said.
Morgan Wamsley, who is originally from Elkins, has stayed four months now at Recovery Point. She’s seeing many of her friends struggle. From affording food, to finding stable work, to staying clean from drug use, Wamsley said many folks are also just plain down on their luck right now. It’s been a tough last few years in the country, and it will certainly continue. Bobby Haley, the bishop’s son, has coordinated the monthly giveaways for about three years now. The neighborhood’s growing need now has A More Excellent Way striving to do more giveaways, he said.
“Once a month is cool, but people are hungry,” he said. “These boxes, they do good, but we would like to grow what we’re doing to at least twice a month, maybe even more.” To do that, however, would require more of everything.
“It’s a need in multiple areas,” he said. “It’s a need in supplies, it’s a need in services, like volunteers.”
Bobby Haley said he’s confident in their ability to make a lot of good out of just a little. He hopes that governmental and private entities with the means to help people direct their resources to operations like A More Excellent Way, where a solid structure already exists. There is plenty of food in the world, he said, but their access to these resources stays limited.
There’s no exact science to their methods, Bishop Haley said. While they have worked a long time to perfect their process, their operation continues to adjust month by month to unforeseen circumstances and hardships.
“We would love to be in a situation where we could just say, ‘Okay, this amount of food is gonna last you exactly two weeks, or three weeks’ – but that’s not the case,” said Bishop Haley. “Whatever we get, that’s what we’ve got to run with.”
