The need in Bay City, as in so many towns across the country, is so great that even the big food pantries are registering unprecedented demand. On any given Monday, a caravan of cars begins to form downtown, gradually extending the length of two city blocks, drivers nosing their minivans and sedans into the parking lot of the local Salvation Army.
Even before Covid, Bay City — a town of about 33,000 nestled on Lake Huron in the crook of Michigan’s thumb, perhaps best known as Madonna’s birthplace — had already been doing its best to address underlying vulnerabilities that intensified the needs of its residents. One local summed up the ethos this way:Bay City has never had money like its neighbor, Midland, where Dow Chemical is headquartered, and from which philanthropic dollars have always flowed.
The area stands at a confluence of industry and agriculture. Commercial freighters bound for Lake Huron still float down the Saginaw River. General Motors still has a presence in town, though its Powertrain factory that once employed 5000 is now down to less than 500. And it’s surrounded by farmland.
As a volunteer, Morand has helped with the food pantry operations for the parishes of St. Vincent De Paul in Bay City for nearly 60 years and has served on the county food council, a group of food pantry and other social outreach program workers from area agencies, since it was started. Morand largely handles the administrative end of things now, but is also known among the members of the food council as a kind of volunteer MacGyver for those cases that require unconventional problem solving – able to engineer a solution in instances that feel otherwise impossible to solve.
The pandemic revealed to him how fragile and interdependent the network of care can be at a local level, like the strands of a spider web — and how quickly, when gaps appear at the governmental level, even a pantry as small as his begins to absorb the reverberations. Shannon Benjamin stands outside her home. She is a co-originator of the donation cabinets spread throughout Bay City.
As a child, Benjamin lived with her grandmother, Barb McEown, in a house on a quiet street, with a porch big enough for a dining table. At Grandma Barb’s, Benjamin played cards or ate candy from Witzke’s, the party store down the street, as the smoke from her grandmother’s cigarette curled out into the dark, bracketing her stories.
1.) TRUMP IS A LIAR! 2.) MAIL IN VOTING IS SAFE AND SECURE. 3.) IT IS ILLEGAL TO VOTE TWICE. 4.) TAKE A PIC OF YOUR BALLOT. 5.) FIND THE WEBSITE TO CONFIRM YOUR VOTE COUNTS. TRUMP WILL NOT SABOTAGE OUR VOTES!!!
They must be really mad at Pelosi. I expect they’ll all be voting republican.
EndAnglophoneCrisis please, any of your reporters should talk about the anglophone crisis. Please Sir, have pity on us. They are killing our children and no one is doing anything. Please in the name of God, Help us.
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