Food Bank Working Hard to Meet Growing Demand

East Valley Tribune, March 20, 2010, by Jim Ripley, Commentary

Benito Ontiveros' day began before sunrise with a trip to the county jail.

No, he's not in trouble.

Ontiveros is in charge of perishable foods at the United Food Bank's warehouse on Javelina Avenue just off of Mesa Drive in Mesa.

But that's his day job. His before-daybreak job is to pick up 10 jail trustees who work at the food bank.

When I arrive at the food bank, the men in their black-and-white-striped jail garb are unloading 18-wheelers, boxing bulk food orders and loading up smaller trucks that will deliver the orders to pantries, shelters, boys and girls clubs and assorted East Valley and eastern Arizona agencies that tend to those in need.

Their reward is a day away from Tent City and two, sometimes three, gourmet meals compared with the jail's infamous green bologna.

In a nearby room, a large group of volunteers from Macy's department store has arrived to sort food brought in from a Boy Scout food drive.

A couple of the volunteers tell me proudly of Macy's Bag Hunger program and how the company donates $20 per hour for every person who volunteers to work at the food bank.

DeAnna Yazzie, who oversees the food bank's volunteer operation, is as passionate about her job as Ontiveros is about his.

She says she will soon run out of work for volunteers.

The Scout drive is over and there will be no more big food drives until postal workers begin theirs in May. Every spring is like that, she says.

She hopes that I'll put out the word that there's no break in the need to feed the hungry. An April food drive, anyone?

Richard Bambauer joins the conversation. One of his jobs is to order food from national as well as local sources with money from individual donations as well as federal programs.

There are six streams of food that flow into the East Valley's food bank, he explains. The trick is to get the most food for the buck.

Bob Evans, director of the East Valley's food bank, describes his organization's role in the food chain in four words: "Food in, food out."

It is a deceptively simple way of describing the workings of a complex organization. This is no highway bridge. This is the 60, the 202, and the 101 bringing traffic in from different directions and funneling it out in other directions.

I have known Evans for a few years, though not well.

We have been brought together by the Mesa United Way, which has asked me under their retired executives program to work with the food bank to help publicize its relocation to a larger facility in west Mesa in April.

Fourteen years ago, the food bank handled 5 million pounds of food. This year it will handle 16 million pounds, Evans says.

Evans says the food bank outgrew its current cramped quarters 10 years ago.

The food bank will move to what had been part of a food processing facility once owned by Rosarita Mexican Foods Co.

The food bank spent $1 million to rehab the Rosarita building it is moving into near Extension Road and Broadway. In return, the food bank will grow from 23,000 square feet to 42,000 square feet, including a 2,000-square-foot room cooled to minus-10 degrees for frozen food storage.

Just as important as the increased space for storage will be the staging area where food is brought in, sorted into orders and distributed to local pantries.

That staging has all taken place in one small space at the current facility with all the efficiency of a freeway intersection with stop lights.

At the food bank's new headquarters, 18-wheelers will be able to unload at the same time that outbound smaller trucks are loaded. And men in black-and-white trustee uniforms won't be dodging forklifts.

Evans is a large, affable man with the ego of a sparrow.

Whatever ego he once might have had was wrung out of him 14 years ago when he found himself downsized out of a well-paying job as a manager in a for-profit company.

Unemployed, he says he sat on a park bench pondering his future. It was then he decided to find work that was less about the paycheck and more about fulfillment.

That led him to volunteer at the food bank and soon to his first job there - a job that paid $8 an hour.

Fourteen years later, Evans is fulfilling his dream and in the process positioning the East Valley's food bank to better meet the needs of shattered lives in a shattered economy.

Jim Ripley is former executive editor of the Tribune. Contact him at jripley@evtrib.com.