GREELEY — Josefina Lujan’s heavy grocery cart rattles against the others in the cramped checkout room at the Weld Food Bank in Greeley.
Lujan, like many others, is a relative newcomer to the food bank.
Monday the U.S. Census Bureau said Greeley has the highest poverty rate among Colorado’s largest cities. About 21.7 percent — one in every five people in Greeley — are living below the federal poverty line.
For the past five months, Lujan, 24, of Greeley has been unable to find a job and been forced to use the food bank’s services.
“I have no food right now, so it is what I do,” Lujan said Monday.
Over the past 12 months, the food bank in Greeley has served 3,751 new families, and the amount of food needed for emergency services has increased by 50 percent, said Leona Martens, the food bank’s executive director.
Martens said the recession has put a heavy strain on the area, and community members have started to notice.
“It is like a ripple effect that just keeps going and going,” Martens said.
That ripple has rolled into every corner of Greeley’s population of 91,492.
The Backpack Program provides homeless students in about 20 different schools in the Greeley and Evans school districts with a pack of food every Friday. The program is a joint effort between the food bank and the nonprofit organization Dream Team.
Jessica Barczewski, child program manager at the food bank, said the program distributed 8,000 packs of food in the 2008 school year, 1,000 more bags than the year before. The increase in demand for the bags has continued to climb in this school year.
The U.S. Census Bureau said 26.9 percent of Greeley’s children younger than 18 live in poverty.
Schools notify the Dream Team when a student needs a bag, and the Dream Team gives the food bank the number of bags needed at each school, Barczewski said.
More families are requesting the food, Barczewski said.
“People are beginning to notice when middle-class families start to show up and do not know what to do, or what they need,” Barczewski said.
The Backpack Program hands out about 200 bags of food a week, but this does not represent the community’s actual need. Barczewski said she believes nearly four times more food is needed.
Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1638 or jsteffen@denverpost.com
