a loooooot a lot a lot a lot of "free food resources for poor people" are literally just scams. some of them are not scams on purpose but have the ultimate end result of wasting the time and energy of poor people and then end up being an app that shows you google map results for "food bank" after they take your user data. a lot of the food or financial resources lists that circulate on tumblr are just lists of these scam/timewasting destinations put together by people who genuinely and sincerely want to help, have googled up a bunch of results and compiled them, but of course have not personally spent the ten hours it would take to test and see if any of them actually function as advertised.
sometimes the resource in question functions well in one city but has zero to offer anyone in any other location, for whatever reason, and very very often, when you DO find a real organization or lead or opportunity, they will have incredibly limited hours of operation, are not taking new clients and wont tell you when they are taking new clients, and/or have other means-testing that is simply infeasible to complete. i think on average i have to spend 1-10 hours on this timewasting shit to find one good lead for any sort of actual material result, and i am living in a DEEP blue liberal democrat metropolitan area.
we should all keep this in mind when we see fundraising posts on this website for people who are asking for food, medicine, or transportation money. the kneejerk response is to wonder why they simply havent gone to the foodbank. well, as a regular foodbank-goer who lives within walking distance of a food bank, let me tell you. it takes days to recover from a single trip there, and days to prepare for the next trip, due to all of the above. they only let you go once per week, so you have to carry as much as you possibly can back home, and you arent allowed to make multiple trips, and they wont let you take enough of anything other than dry beans to last more than a week anyway. so you cant make multiple trips per week, but you also cant stock up adequately to avoid running out of stuff like dairy and fruit in a couple days. if i was SLIGHTLY more disabled, or had kids, or had a normal job with normal job hours, it would be entirely impossible to go at all.
i could just lie to them and go multiple times a week anyway, and this would qualify as "welfare fraud". when you see accusations of "welfare fraud", keep this in mind also.
if you personally want to post a list of these resources, it behooves you to note for each one in you list whether you have personally used the resource or not, WHEN you did so, WHAT the result was, and WHERE you are located. if you cant vouch for it, go ahead and post the lead anyway, but say so. try to help people triage their list of leads
EDIT: someone points out they dont even let you GO TO A FOOD BANK in the uk without a fucking referral. it's unbelievable. it really is possible to starve in Britain and the United States while the grocery store down the block dumps day-old food into a dumpster and soaks it all in bleach. they do it every single day
see this is exactly the kind of shit i am talking about. that is over an hour away one way without a car, has no parking if i did have a car, would cost >$6 on a bus, and is one single meal for two days a week. shut the fuck up!
this has been my experience with a lot of resources well-meaning friends have linked me when i was really going through it financially: a lot of the time people are doing it because they care, can't afford to financially help and want to do something, but what this works out to in practice is a ton of people sending unvetted links that i have to do the work of vetting and saying 'maybe you can use these, anything helps right'
and then thinking that since there are all these 'resources' out there, this must mean that there's a lot of help that i just need to be made aware of
here's how it went for me:
-i live in an area with 'good' food banks. this means that they do not check my ID, they do not ask for proof of income or a referral, and they do not limit the amount of times you can visit them. while there have been some times i've gotten rotten food from them, mostly what i've gotten has been shelf-stable or fresh.
if you look in the comments you will see that this is not the norm in many places. many people cannot even access their local distributions or have 'food banks' that are unsafe to go to because places will offload rotten food. many of these places will often not mention things like this on their websites, so the only way you find out if a food bank is inaccessible or distributes unsafe food is to go there yourself.
all of the food banks in my area are open 2-3 hours at most (but in my experience sometimes everything is gone if you get there closer to the end). some of them are open one day a week, some of them are open one day a month.
many of them will distribute bags of food that you can pick up and take. (the ones with fresh food are the ones open one day a month) these bags have canned food and things like pasta and rice. looking at them, i would say that the contents of one of these bags is 20-30 dollars worth of shelf staples, no vegetables or fruit, obviously, but i think that in an emergency if someone had no food allergies or other dietary restrictions there's enough white rice in there to last you for a few days if you just want to eat white rice (with some canned tuna and tomato sauce for flavor) and nothing else. it's not fun but it's better than starving
here are the issues:
-the food bank distributions are not within walking distance of me, and our bus system is not the greatest, and our car often breaks down. what this means is that if i want to go to these food bank distributions, i have to spend (like it was mentioned above) at least 6 dollars for bus fare to access 30 dollars of groceries. this will also take me at minimum 3-4 hours, because it takes an hour and a half at least for the bus each way.
and the best ('best') part of all of this is that the amount i get from the food bank will not last me an entire week until the next distribution so if the goal here was 'make it so i don't have to rely on outside help for food' i will...still have to do that anyway.
like, i really need people to know that in my case 'going to the food bank' requires me to already have some money and 4 hours of my time and an entire day, because you have to schedule around it since you can't miss your bus, to get 30 dollars of white rice and canned food. that's it
or, if i had 30 dollars in cash in my bank account, i could simply go to the grocery store and buy something that isn't 30 dollars of white rice and canned food, maybe even a fresh vegetable
and it wouldn't take the entire day.
i know a lot of people can't financially help even when they want to, and it's better than starving, but it's just so ridiculously disheartening and assumes you're both in good enough health and have an entire free day to spend traveling and to do it all for 20 dollars of canned food and white rice.
i guess that's the point of it all (to make it so inconvenient that people 'just get a job' instead of 'leeching off the system') but when i think back to it it still hurts.
everyone i saw at the food bank had a job. kids. but they still spent their time going, because what other option did they have?
and being able to go at all and get that 20 dollars of canned food means you're 'lucky'.
other people have it worse.
assistance programs outside food banks are much, much harder to access.
