COUNTYWIDE : New Food Program to Aid Thousands

Thousands of poverty-stricken women in Orange County will receive help feeding their families each month under a new food program announced by the Community Development Council.

The program will provide more than 4.5 million pounds of food, or an estimated 60,000 food packages, to low-income mothers and their children, county officials said.

Designed to meet basic nutritional needs, the Commodity Supplemental Food Program will provide relief to eligible women and children who have been unable to participate in the federal Women, Infants and Children feeding program, which had been severely reduced in Orange County because of budget cutbacks.

“It’s the same target population as the WIC program, which has been very hard hit here,” said CDC food bank manager Mark Lowry.

The program is available to low-income pregnant, postpartum and breast-feeding women and to infants and children through the age of 6.

Each month, families will receive a 40-pound box of food that will include cheese, infant formula, canned fruits and vegetables, cornmeal, peanut butter, beef, pork and other goods.

County providers said the program will help to fill a need that has reached almost crisis proportions. Many mothers who have been turned away from the WIC program have sought assistance at emergency food outlets, stretching the county’s private social-service system almost to the breaking point.

“It’s wonderful,” said Dolores Barrett, coordinator of social services for the Salvation Army and co-chairwoman of the Orange County Hunger Coalition. “Emergency food providers are getting women at the doors who couldn’t be accommodated by the WIC program, and we’re very frustrated because we don’t have the baby formula and other things that these families need.”

Although an estimated 63,000 women, children and infants in the county qualify for the WIC program, only about 18,500 can be accommodated, WIC coordinator Michelle Van Eyken said.

The WIC program recently was able to increase its caseload of women and infants by 3,000 per month but is still unable to serve eligible children.

Lowry said the CDC, which serves as the county’s official poverty agency, is one of only two agencies in the state approved to operate the supplemental food program.

Established by the U.S Department of Agriculture in 1968, the Commodity Supplemental Food Program has since been outstripped in popularity and funding by the WIC program, which offers nutritional education as well as food vouchers that can be redeemed at supermarkets.

The CDC will receive $240,000 from the state Department of Education to administer the program. However, the agency also is soliciting community-based providers to serve as sites for enrolling clients and distributing food.

The county Health Care Agency has also agreed to allow the CDC to operate at county facilities to enroll eligible clients.

The first food packages are expected to be delivered in mid-May.