One hot meal not enough

PROVO — Well-meaning volunteers line up near homeless shelters each holiday season to serve food to those who need it.

Volunteers leave feeling that they've done their part to help the less fortunate, but unfortunately, they actually aren't doing as much as they think they are to help the homeless, according to those who run poverty-relief groups.

Believing that the homeless will benefit most from being served a hot meal is one of the common misconceptions that surround the issue of homelessness, they said.

"Serving people food is a very small, small slice of the picture," said Utah County United Way chief Bill Hulterstrom. "I would rather give some of these families cases of tuna."

Utah County Community Action director Myla Dutton agreed that although some food needs to be served, donations to food banks can help the homeless far more effectively, even prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.

"We actually utilize our food banks to help (keep families out of homelessness)," Dutton said. "There have been families that we have fed for weeks so that they could use all of their food money toward the rent as the husband is getting another part-time job."

And while food banks receive many donations around the holidays, the rest of the year is far leaner, so holiday donations must be stretched out to cover the entire year.

"By end of October, the warehouse is almost empty," Dutton said. "Hunger is not just during the holidays. And as I said, we utilize food to help people get through all sorts of financial crises. So the more supply of food we have, the better we can deal with some of these other issues."

Dutton said her organization can help even more when the food bank receives financial donations.

"For every $1 given to the food bank, we generate 17 pounds of food," she said. "We don't buy food with the dollar, we use it to put gas in the truck to go get the free food at Smith's. We go to many local grocers who give us vegetables and fruit and bread. Of the 1.6 million pounds of food that came in last year, 400,000 of that was from grocers."

Dutton said another misconception the public has about the homeless is that they desperately need barracks-style shelters. Utah County does not have a brick-and-mortar shelter like the one in downtown Salt Lake, but instead uses Utah Valley motels as part of a voucher sheltering system.