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When Flagler Broadcasting President David Ayres issued the press release about Friday’s third annual Food-a-Thon on WNZF and its sister stations–the drive to raise $200,000–he cited a figure of 3,500 families that the money would help feed every month. Pastor Charles Silano, whose Grace Community Food Pantry is the Food-a-Thon’s beneficiary, quickly called him. The 3,500 figure was last year’s tally. This year, Silano said, the number is approaching 6,000.
Nearly 6,000 families have registered with Grace Community’s food bank. “It might be just a summer thing. I don’t know,” Silano said. “But we get new families that come and register with us every month.” Silano estimates the average family has 3.5 people. “You’re almost at 20,000 individuals,” or almost a fifth of the county’s population.
The families don’t all show up every week at the food distributions on Education Way, off of U.S. 1. Right now the Saturday and Sunday food distributions will total 1,200 families per weekend, 1,400 families when the Mondex is included. The very long caravan of cars waiting to enter the grounds of the food bank’s operation have become a familiar sight. So have the occasional but always misplaced, contemptible comments on social media blathering on about certain cars in line, as if–like J.D. Vance sneering in Hillbilly Elegy about food stamps recipients having cell phones–to blame the needy for faking it.
“People judge people real fast,” Ayres said. “They see some nice looking cars sitting along the roadway waiting for food, and they come to the conclusion that these people are taking advantage of it and why should I donate money for them to have food. So with that, Silano said that the stories of these people inside those cars are what people don’t have any idea about.”
WNZF’s Kirk Keller, who will be hosting most of the Food-a-Thon’s six hours Friday (Ayres will host the 9-t-10 slot, when he usually hosts Free For All Fridays), interviewed numerous food pantry clients as they waited in line either at the U.S. 1 location or in the Mondex, where Silano takes a truck every other Saturday. Here are some of the testimonies Keller heard:
A man: “I’m just barely making it right now. I’m out of work because I have a bad hip and I just got fired a couple of weeks ago. I’m getting another job, and this helps big time with the food. I’m just barely, barely making it. And I’m here every Saturday until I get my operation on my hip and get back to work.” He has two children and a wife. When Keller asks him what he would do if the food bank wasn’t there, the man was overcome with emotion and apologizes. “Sorry So, so, so hard. I’m down to my last $40, $50 that I had in my savings. I mean, the prices of food right now are outrageous. And there’s a lot of people out there that need this.”
A woman who comes to the food bank once w eek: “If it wasn’t here, we wouldn’t be eating much at all.” She’s been picking up food at Grace Community since Covid. “Without it, I will probably be homeless because the money would go to groceries. You have to live, you know, so bills wouldn’t be paid.” The weekly box of food feeds four in her family.
Another woman says she feeds her family and picks up another box for another family when she drives in every two weeks or so: many families in need can’t drive their “nice cars” to the food pantry, because they don’t have a car. But others help them.
A man on disability in the Mondex: “I’ve been out of work with my disability. They went out and sold the business after 35 years.” He couldn’t find another job because “There’s only certain stuff I can do.” He says he only goes to the food drop when he needs it. “If I’m working, I leave it to somebody else.”
Silano can leverage every $1 into $5 worth of groceries, because he buys the food through a network of food banks that offer it at discount. The two previous years’ Food-a-Thons helped buy a refrigerated truck, which helps with food drops around the county–they occur in the Mondex, in Espanola the third Saturday of every month and at Bunnell’s Carver Center the first Friday of every month–and a refrigerated container. This year the focus is on directing all the money toward more food, especially with the steeper needs–and a reduction in big donations to Food-a-Thon: in previous years, the drive could bank on a few big checks in the $1,000 to $5,000 range. That may not be the case this year.
“So we’re really reaching out for more people with smaller pledges this here,” Ayres said. “I got some matching dollars. So in other words, if somebody can afford $50, I have a pool of money where we can match that $50 and make it $100. Then that $100 of course times five will buy $500 worth of food. So we’re going to be encouraging people: if it’s $10, we need it. Because some people are intimidated, where we had a $5,000 donation and they’re like, Well, what’s my $20 gonna do this year? That $20 is extremely important. We just need everybody and anybody and anything. The people are hurting.”
The matching dollars are coming from Dr. Steven Bickel and the Vigilante Philanthropists, the group Bickel, Ayres and Bob Snyder quietly established as a behind-the-scenes Samaritan for people and causes in need. On Free For All Friday, Ayres will feature Silano–who’ll be on most of the day–and local leaders, elected officials and the like.
It sometimes gets emotional on the air. “It probably was last year on the air live. I had two grown men crying, maybe, you know, very emotional kind of choking up,” Ayres recalled, “and it was Jeff Douglas and Joe Wright.” Douglas is the owner of Douglas Properties. Wright is the owner of Quantum Electric. “Jeff was talking about how he he grew up as a kid and was hungry, and Joe Wright also, was was talking about it and was so moved by the story. He doubled his donation to it.”
Grace Community isn’t the only food pantry in town, but it’s the largest.
“We have monthly donors, we have people that are very, very faithful,” Silano said of the support for Grace Community Food Pantry. “So Food-a-Thon is not the only source. It is the biggest source by far. We always have the the added expense of keeping up the infrastructure, repairing it,” beyond the 99 percent that goes to food and the occasional gas card. The food pantry also carries out home deliveries for some 50 shut-ins, most of them on disability.
“I never get tired of saying it: We have an incredible community,” Silano said. “This event, of course, is a large event for us. But we’ve had people that just pull up, they see the line, they’ve never met us before, and they’ll just start offering their services. They get excited about it. They not only want to volunteer, they want to do a fundraiser on their own, at the office or whatever company they work at. They’ll do food drives for us. We have a very caring community. I can’t express that enough. I’ve always had a little slogan: when Flagler County has a need, Flagler County residents respond.”
