A Slow-Moving Crisis, With No End In Sight: Heart of the Hamptons Food Pantry Has Seen Surge in Need for 14 Straight Months

On December 9, Heart of the Hamptons — the community nonprofit that operates a food pantry in Southampton Village and provides other forms of assistance to families in need — will host its 20th annual Polar Bear Plunge at Coopers Beach.

It’s a day many Southampton residents circle on their calendar every year, an event that spreads goodwill and embodies the spirit of what it means to be a community — and it is the biggest fundraiser for the organization all year, helping it provide groceries and meals for local families and individuals.

While the community support for the organization remains consistently strong, there has been a disturbing trend over the last year that could represent a new and unsettling normal.

When people sign up to take their cold plunges into the Atlantic in December, they will be supporting an organization that needs that support more than ever.

For 14 months straight, Heart of the Hamptons has seen a monthly increase in the number of people coming to the food pantry it operates out of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Roman Catholic Church on Hill Street, and that streak shows no signs of ending, especially as the organization heads into what are typically its busiest months of the year.

It’s forced Executive Director Molly Bishop and her staff and volunteers to be increasingly creative and in some instances scramble on a week-to-week basis to meet the demand and ensure they can fulfill the organization’s mission to never let any community members go hungry.

To say it has been a challenge would be an understatement.

Bishop shared some sobering statistics during a presentation at a Southampton Village Board meeting earlier this month, after the board announced it would help support Heart of the Hamptons with funds from the state’s Community Development Block Grant Program.

August 2022 was the first month when the trend of increasing need from month-to-month began, Bishop said, pointing out that in August 2023, the need was almost double what it was the previous August.

“Every month since then has been significantly higher than that month the year before,” she said. “Some of those months, the need was almost double, if not higher, than it was the previous year.”

By September, Heart of the Hamptons had already surpassed the total number of meals it provided for clients in all of 2022, and Bishop pointed out that October, November and December are traditionally the busiest months of the year for the organization.

“If things are even just the same this year as they were last November and December, we will definitely serve over 300,000 meals this year,” she said.

The numbers are particularly alarming because they are not the result of an acute but ultimately temporary crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. Food pantries across the region experienced a surge in need at that time because so many people lost their jobs or were forced to quit to take care of family members.

With the pandemic emergency ending, the hope and expectation was that demand would return to normal levels at local food pantries — and for a while, Bishop said, that’s what happened.

But then a more insidious, slow-moving crisis arrived. And unlike the pandemic, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

“Last summer was when inflation really seemed to take off,” Bishop said. “We started to realize this wasn’t so much about people trying to recover from the setbacks of COVID, but that this was essentially a new normal in a different economy.

“The housing situation is really driving the economic stress that most of the families we serve are feeling,” Bishop added, pointing out that the majority of the clients the pantry serves are working families, most of them with two incomes. Still, it is not enough to put food on the table, thanks to both inflation and soaring housing costs that were approaching unreasonable levels before the pandemic, and then went completely off the rails in the pandemic’s aftermath.

“People have told us recently that they’re paying as much as $2,000 per month for a single bedroom, in a boardinghouse-style living situation,” Bishop said, adding that in many of those instances, those renters don’t even have access to a shared kitchen or living room area.

She said she’s heard of families renting a home from a landlord and then trying to supplement the cost of their own sky-high rent by renting out one of the bedrooms to another individual, exacerbating the problem.

“There’s just not enough inventory, so owners feel like they can charge whatever they want,” Bishop said. “Some landlords even say they won’t rent to anyone with kids. The whole thing is an injustice.”

The crisis is not only forcing organizations like Heart of the Hamptons to find creative ways to raise more money and bring in more food to meet the need every week, but it’s also forcing them to expand far beyond the mission of simply providing meals and work on more creative ways to help families in need.

“One thing we’ve started to try to do is identify other programs that our clients might be eligible for, like SNAP and WIC,” Bishop said. “I openly encourage clients to go to as many pantries as they can, so they can get food from multiple sources.”

Bishop said they’ve also been soliciting help from other sources, reaching out to farms and food retailers in the area for donations and help covering gaps in what they can provide.

“We get a very generous donation weekly of fresh produce from Hapco Farms,” she said. “It used to be enough to give produce to every family, but not anymore. We’ve reached out to other local farms like Halsey Farm, the Milk Pail and Corwith’s, and we get enough produce from them for now to have enough.”

Cutting down on the shelf stable items from the distributor and instead trying to source donations of fresh bread from Citarella, Goldberg’s Bagels and the Golden Pear has been another way the organization has tried to cut costs while still meeting the needs of its ever-increasing number of clients.

Bishop shared that the food pantry ran out of meat late last week, and had to call on Richie King of North Sea Farms. He brought over several boxes of chicken wings and saved the day.

The situation feels unsustainable, Bishop said, with no clear solution in sight.

“I think it’s not feasible that the cost of things is going to go down eventually,” she said. “Around the world, prices went up because of COVID and supply chain issues, and people thought eventually they’d go back down — but they’re not. And then you have us sort of isolated out here, where everything is more expensive, and we have this housing crisis we’re in.

“A lot of people sold during COVID, and some got burned during the eviction moratorium and don’t want to rent anymore, so we do just have this unsustainable economy out here. It’s heightened even more than it is in other communities.

“We need a workforce here,” she continued. “This is a year-round economy now. But we’re not giving them any place to live.”

Despite all the mounting challenges, Bishop remains determined and says Heart of the Hamptons will continue to find a way, somehow.

“We will do it,” she said. “That’s our mission, to make sure no one is hungry. Whatever sacrifices we need to make, or help we need to find or money we need to raise, we’ll do it to make sure we’re constantly able to meet the need.”

Bishop acknowledged that her job is Sisyphean in nature these days.

“It takes a lot of time and effort,” she said. “Certainly, dollar for dollar, my time is probably better spent asking for money and writing grant proposals than running around and picking up donated apples, but in the moment, that’s what we need to do.

“It definitely has gotten harder, and sometimes it’s stressful because it’s not like COVID, which you knew would end eventually. This feels like you’re just going and spinning until the week is over, and then you start all over again the next week.”