Susan Bysiewicz on WNHH’s “Dateline New Haven,”
Susan Bysiewicz has looked at the numbers, looked at the long food-giveway lines — and sees a role for state government to help keep families fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Bysiewicz, the state’s lieutenant governor, was already focusing on both state agriculture and small business before the pandemic struck and increased the number of people going hungry in Connecticut. Now she’s helping coordinate ways to get food to the people who need it — rather than having it go to waste.
Bysiewicz talked about that during an appearance Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program, in which she also answered listener questions about small business relief, phased-in reopenings, and voting during the pandemic.
Bysiewicz noted that in other states, farmers used to providing food to now-shuttered universities and restaurants are dumping milk they can’t sell.
“We don’t want to have that happen” here, she said.
Donations from New Haven’s “Food Garage” being prepared for distribution at Common Ground.
She has visited food pantry giveaways, in which lines of cars stretch longer and longer as more families exhaust savings after losing jobs. Some 1,500 families lined up at a meal giveaway she visited in Norwalk last week, for instance. Before Covid-19 struck, she said, one in nine adults and one in five children were already sometimes going hungry in the state; now those numbers have “dramatically” risen, as unemployment has hit 15 to 20 percent and 515,000 state residents (out of 3.5 million) have filed for benefits. That is “a staggering number. That has put a big strain on families.”
“We know the need is huge,” Bysiewicz said. “The good news is that people in Connecticut have stepped up.”
Bysiewicz said she has helped the state’s agricultural department make connections between farmers and food banks and other distributors of free meals to reroute needed food. Guida, for instance, donated 50,000 half-gallons of milk this week. “We want to make sure that whatever is surplus is given to people who need it,” she said. So she has visited farmers throughout the state to scope out the situation.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave two farms a grant to donate 500 boxes of fresh food a day. Bysiewicz said the state agriculture department linked the donor to organizations like the East Haven Board of Education and New Haven’s Common Ground High School to get the food into the hands of families who need it. The state is also working with Connecticut Food Share and the Connecticut Food Bank.
Click on the video below to listen to the full interview with Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” which included an update on statewide census efforts.