Williams is a member of the Coastside Hope board of directors and the man in charge of the food programs provided by the area’s largest social service organization. Concern is hardly novel for a man in his position.
Lately, though, he feels the water getting higher.
  
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Last month, Coastside Hope’s Family Harvest and emergency pantry programs welcomed 20 percent more clients and doled out 60 percent more food than in October 2007. Williams wonders whether that increase in demand per hungry individual is a harbinger of bad things to come. Are people less able to meet their most basic needs in the midst of a weakening economy?
These days, the organization provides about 80 tons of food annually, much of it provided by the Second Harvest Food Bank. That’s roughly double the amount of food that passed through the Coastside Hope warehouse in Princeton in 2004.
Williams said he and his fleet of volunteers provided about 100 pounds of food to each of 78 families who came for help during the monthly Family Harvest giveaway on Thursday. That number has remained steady for a reason.
“That’s about as much as we can run through our warehouse,” he said.
This year, Coastside Hope, in conjunction with volunteers from Community United Methodist Church in Half Moon Bay, began a weekly food distribution to seniors in the community room at Half Moon Village. The dozens of fixed-income seniors who rely on the program used to have to trek to the Princeton warehouse for the monthly distribution.
“This meets their needs much better,” Williams said.
Partly as a result of the new “Brown Bag” program for seniors, the number of people served each month by Senior Coastsiders has risen dramatically.
Donations haven’t kept pace, but neither have they fallen much in a wilting economy — so far.
““We haven’t noticed it too much,” he said. “We’ve been reading about (the failing economy) and we worry about it.”
Scouting for food
About 15 percent of the nearly 200,000 pounds of food that comes into Coastisde Hope every year comes from local food drives.
Each year the students at Cunha Intermediate School bring in nonperishables, and local mail carriers have a regular drive of their own. Both efforts gathered a little less food this year than last.
At least one local food drive was more successful in 2008. Coastside Boy Scouts managed to corral more than 3,300 pounds of food from their neighbors during a drive held on Nov. 15.
Jane Mountain, who has coordinated the Boy Scouts effort on the coast for two years now, said about 130 boys participate and that they all get as much as they give.
“Being aware of hunger and the needs of people is one thing,” she said in an e-mail to the Review. “Actively getting involved and doing something about it is another. I think the boys develop a greater sense of empathy for others.”
That empathy is a Scouting tradition. The food drive started in 1988 as a partial response to what the Boy Scouts identified as “Five Unacceptables” in America – hunger, drug abuse, child abuse, illiteracy and unemployment. That first year, 1 million scouts collected 65 million cans of food.
— Clay Lambert
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