North county food bank seeks to expand

o On the Web: www.nccfoodbank.org (you can watch a video about the food bank’s space squeeze).

o Phone: 360-687-5007.

o Address: 17 N.E. Third Ave., Battle Ground.

o Donations: Cash and “all foods that are not open, out-of-date or home-canned” are always welcome. So are school and home supplies, garden produce and grocery bags.

o Art show fundraiser: This weekend’s second annual “Hanging at the Summit,” an art show hosted by the Northwest Oil Painters Guild, will benefit the NCCFB. Meet artists in action 6-9 p.m. Saturday; art sale is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; all at Summit Grove Lodge, 30810 N.E. Timmen Road, Ridgefield (but take La Center exit 16). Wine and microbrew tastings available too.

BATTLE GROUND — Elizabeth Cerveny and the board of the North County Community Food Bank have a big vision for their future: a spacious $2.5 million building that sister social service agencies would also call home. They’re not sure how realistic that is, but executive director Cerveny is spreading the word to see what turns up.

Here’s what she does know: The mazelike North County Community Food Bank is so cramped, Cerveny keeps waiting for accidents to happen as volunteers hustle boxes and bags of supplies around tight corners and through narrow doorways. Despite modular shelves that have grown toward the ceiling, she said, there simply isn’t enough capacity in the 1,800-square-foot building, and Cerveny said she’s always toeing a fine line between feeding as many hungry people as possible while not ordering more supplies than the place has room to store.

Fire code dictates that only 10 clients at a time can be in the building’s tight shopping area, Cerveny said. That means there’s often a line including frail or ill elderly people and parents with young children waiting outside the door, no matter the weather. There’s no waiting area or lobby for them. In fact there’s no private office space at all, so new clients often must submit to an intake interview within earshot of — well, everybody. At least some find that completely humiliating, Cerveny said, despite the compassion that food bank workers dole out along with every food box.

“There are some people who are just very private,” she said.

But even while the North County Community Food Bank is so cramped, Cerveny and her board keep thinking big thoughts about helping the needy in the area north and east of Battle Ground. Those thoughts are bigger than just filling their bellies, she said. They’re as big as teaching clients to turn their lives around so they don’t need to visit the food bank anymore, she said.

Many social service agencies are heading in that direction these days, Cerveny pointed out. They’re not just filling immediate needs and sending people on their way; they’re teaching résumé-writing and job-hunting skills, household budgeting and nutritional cooking, strategic shopping and growing produce at home, better renting and better parenting. Life skills, coaching and case management are the best way to build what become self-sustaining lives, she said.

“Let’s start giving clients the services they really need,” Cerveny said. “Not just food stamps but a bridge to something better. And let’s bring it all together under one roof.”

But there’s nearly nothing in the way of human services in the city of Battle Ground, let alone in the countryside beyond it, Cerveny pointed out. The state Department of Social and Health Services closed its office years ago, she said, and Vancouver-based public transit makes travel in north county inconvenient. A mobile food bank shows up at a different north county parking lot every Sunday. Church-based Adventist Community Services in nearby Meadow Glade operates a food bank that’s open two days week.

The bottom line, she said, is that many needy people who live north of Battle Ground have simply “given up” on getting help. “They have nowhere to turn,” she said. “There are no functioning social service agencies with a physical presence in north Clark County.”

Meanwhile, Cerveny said, human needs in rural Clark County continue to soar. She’s aware of immigrant and Apostolic Lutheran families whose loss of jobs and homes have prompted them to cram together into households of as many as 20 people, she said. She’s aware of the food bank’s numbers always rising.

When the agency first started out in the 1980s as a program of Clark County, Cerveny said, its caseload was 43 households. Nowadays, she said, its monthly caseload is as many as 750 households representing more than 7,200 individuals.

According to a 2011 report by the Chicago nonprofit Feeding America, 28 percent of Clark County children (31,160 individuals) and 17.3 percent of all Clark County residents (72,140 individuals) are “food insecure,” meaning they can’t count on a reliable supply of enough nutritious food for a healthy lifestyle, and may go hungry or trade off food against other basic needs.

“With the recent tanking of the economy, there are families that never had to ask for help before who are coming to us,” Cerveny said.

The same belt-tightening that resulted in layoffs and foreclosures also resulted in budget cuts to public services such as transit, food stamps and job training, she said. That may make sense in the short term, she said, but the long-term effect on society is a permanently trapped underclass with no obvious way out of its predicament.

“You start whittling away at budgets — does it actually help anybody or does it just meet your budget?” she wondered. Social service officials like her are left extending a lifeline to the most desperate when they’d like to be helping those people rebuild productive lives and get off public assistance. But that requires a greater investment on the front end, she said.

“We can’t keep just chasing food,” she said. “We’ve got to collectively come together and see how we can treat the problem better.”

Used or new building?

Cerveny and the North County Community Food Bank board are hoping to raise at least $2.5 million. That’s enough to buy and remodel a certain 20,000-square-foot commercial building with three bay doors that they have in mind as a model if not a realistic possibility, Cerveny said; it would offer plenty of room for storage and sorting as well as offices and classrooms for the food bank and partner agencies.

“I want a building three times the size and a freezer that’s twice the size,” said volunteer Dave Stradley, who spends several days a week negotiating those tight storage spaces. “It is too chaotic back here.”

Even better than that, Cerveny added, would be enough money and support to build a building — a new headquarters for social services in north Clark County.