‘Huge numbers living day to day’ says food appeal founder

The coronavirus crisis has altered how many of us live and work but food poverty activist Ken Smollen is busier than ever, delivering packages to hundreds of hard up families across the midlands.

Since the Clara based retired garda established the Ken Smollen Food Appeal almost three and a half years ago, he and his team of volunteers have helped almost 800 households, including more than 100 in Westmeath.

They currently deliver packages to around 500 families a month, and the guidelines on social distancing have led to significant changes to how he operates. Firstly, to avoid meeting the people his organisation helps, Smollen starts around five or six o’clock every morning.

“The reason I am going out early in the morning is so I don’t meet people, especially the families that I am delivering food to. I drop the bags at their doors,” he said.

“We collected so much [non-perishable, long lasting] food before Christmas that we are still working from that, although it is still dwindling. We think that we have enough supplies to do another three weeks.

“When we are packing bags, we put them away for three days before delivering [the experts believe the coronavirus can live for up to three days on hard surfaces]. I am also wearing gloves and using hand sanitiser.”

His deliveries may be taking less time because of the lack of social interaction, but the rest of Smollen’s day is spent preparing for the days ahead. From returning messages to families looking for help to packing food parcels, he says that many of his days are “seriously long”.

He wouldn’t be able to do what he does, he says, without the different groups and businesses who donate food.

“We have what I call Family Rescue Teams, mainly in Offaly and Westmeath, who are brilliant people who donate food about once a month.

“We have approximately 30 teams. I try to get to one or two teams a day, then I come back to the store and check the dates of every single item.

“You do find the odd thing that is out of date. I don’t expect anyone to eat something that I wouldn’t give my own family.”

Although he has an underlying health condition, Smollen says that the high levels of mainly unseen poverty experienced by many across the midlands means that he feels compelled to help them, particularly the families with young children or elderly people.

The demand for help has unsurprisingly increased since the start of the crisis.

He estimates that his group helps around 3,000 people a month, if on average four people live in each house.

This however, Smollen says, is “only scratching the surface”. In the early days when the numbers he was helping were smaller, he generally tried to deliver a package to people within 24 hours of them getting in touch. Depending on demand people sometimes now have to wait two or three days.

Smollen says that when it comes to new cases, he trusts his intuition about whether a family is genuine, but will always bring a parcel of food on his first visit. In the last three and half years, there have been fewer than 10 families that he has refused to help again. Elected to Offaly County Council in last year’s local elections, Smollen says that despite what critics say, he isn’t politically motivated.

“When you see a young child rip open a bag of food and take out a pack of 26c biscuits as if all of their Christmases and birthdays have come at once, you know that a family are in trouble. Adults may be able to put on an act, but children can’t.

“A huge amount of people leave voice messages every day. I try to listen to the messages twice a day as they fill up quickly. There are a huge amount of people living day to day.”