Food banks feel the strain without holiday volunteers
26 November 2020
America's food banks are sounding the alarm during this unprecedented holiday season.
The big picture: Soup kitchens and charities, usually brimming with holiday volunteers, are getting far less help.
- Older volunteers, at high risk from the virus, are staying home. A food bank in Idaho Falls fed up to 200 hungry people a day pre-pandemic, but closed completely this month because of lack of volunteers, Reuters reports.
- 60% of food banks with Feeding America — the largest such network in the country — reported they could use more volunteers.
- Over 50 million people in the U.S., including 17 million children, could become food insecure this year due to the pandemic, per a Feeding America analysis.
What they're saying: “We are in desperate need of volunteers ... in the soup kitchen especially,” Salvation Army volunteer Erin Rischawy told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
- “With shelters being on the high-risk list to contract and spread COVID, we had to make the difficult decision to still celebrate but not do it as we normally do,” Tara Davis, executive director of Friendship Mission, told the Montgomery Advertiser.
The other side: Some charities are purposefully going without their usual number of volunteers, or asking people to stay home due to COVID-19 safety concerns.
- Miriam's Kitchen, a D.C. nonprofit, is working with only eight volunteers per shift in outdoor tents to deliver meals to the city's homeless population.
Go deeper: In photos: Americans wait at food banks before Thanksgiving
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.