Among rising need, community organizations are stepping up to help assist families across the Monadnock region facing a rising cost of living and an ongoing struggle with housing and food needs.

January is National Poverty Awareness Month, and while New Hampshire’s poverty rate of 7.2% of 2022, as reported by the Fiscal Policy Institute, is the lowest in the country, that still equates to about 98,000 residents who struggle, with one in every 14 children in the state living below the poverty level.

About one in four households in the state made less than $50,000 in 2022, reported the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. About one in six reported an income of less than $35,000 and half were under $100,000, which, when adjusted for inflation, represents a decline in household income between 2021 and 2022.

In 2023, one in three residents of the state reported paying household expenses was either “somewhat” or “very” difficult, which is a higher percentage than during 2020 and 2021, when residents had access to pandemic assistance.

Mandy Carter, a community resources specialist and kinship navigator at The River Center in Peterborough, said the existence of her position, created in 2020, is an indicator of the growing need. Since she was brought on board, The River Center has also added an assistant for Carter, due to the amount of cases she was dealing with, she said.

Carter said when she started in 2020, she was assisting about 10 families or individuals. Now she said that number is about 50, with her assistant handling a further 30.

Carter’s main role is as a facilitator, helping residents reach aid through applying for disability benefits, connecting them with their town’s welfare officers or state or federal aid programs, or for acute needs like medical equipment. She said increasingly the main thing she receives calls for is people seeking housing.

“The community need has always been housing,” Carter said.

According to Carter, it’s a dual problem – Peterborough’s nearly nonexistent vacancy rate for rental housing and the cost being out of reach for most of the people who contact her.

“I get three or four phone calls a day, looking for apartments,” Carter said. “And there’s nothing I can do for those people, other than direct them to shelters, and even those are usually full.”

Melissa Gallagher, executive director of the Grapevine Family & Community Resource Center in Antrim, said the center has also seen a steady increase of clientele.

In its most-recent year, the center provided direct financial assistance for necessities such as groceries, gas, child care, clothing, electric or phone bills and heating repairs to a total of 45 families. It also provided a further 41 families with ongoing needs to connect them with other services or aid, and provided funds or assistance to 45 “kinship” families – caregivers who become responsible for children who are related to them, such as grandparents raising their grandchildren.

Gallagher said the biggest issues the center sees are heating costs in the winter – which led to the creation of the center’s free wood bank – housing, transportation and access to mental health services.

Fighting food insecrity

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Household Food Security Report for 2022, an estimated 6.2% of residents in the state were experiencing food insecurity between 2020 and 2022, an increase from about 5.4% from 2019 to 2021. Nationally, food insecurity increased by about 10 million people compared to 2021.

Carol Cleary, a co-program coordinator for the ConVal Regional School District’s End 68 Hours of Hunger program, said the goal of the program is to send students home on Friday with enough food to provide for them throughout the weekend, as well as providing snack bags to other community hubs, such as libraries.

“What we’ve found is that food insecurity is a systemic problem, and it’s a learned behavior – those are hard to change,” Cleary said. “Just having the food show up, and be available all the time, always there, every week, creates a consistency in availability.”

Approximately 440 students in the ConVal system are eligible for either free or reduced lunch. Cleary’s co-coordinator, Linda Caracappa, said the program puts together between 170 and 200 bags of food each week. In the 2022-2023 school year, the program distributed a total of 7,700 bags of food, an increase of about 270 bags from the previous year.

Some local food pantries have been seeing unprecedented increases in need, such as the St. Vincent de Paul Food Pantry in Greenville, which serves Greenville, New Ipswich, Temple and Mason. The food pantry has reported a nearly tenfold increase in the number of meals it provides to the community, going from about 2,400 meals monthly in 2022 to more than 20,000 a month currently.

The increase was so dramatic, the pantry had to purchase a new box truck to help transport its meals from the state’s food bank.

Others, such as the Open Cupboard Food Pantry in Wilton, haven’t seen such a dramatic change. Open Cupboard Director Linda LaDouceur said, in fact, the pantry is serving about five fewer families compared to the previous year.

Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172, Ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.