Council meeting spotlights basic need challenges facing residents

Despite the affluence of the Tecumseh community, food insecurity and homelessness exist, and these were thrust into the spotlight Monday night when the city council heard from a pair of community members who work with these populations.

D’Angelo Boone, director of CRM Meal Assistance Program of Lenawee, and Frank Nagle, director of Community Impact for ProMedica, talked about the scope of poverty in both Lenawee County and right here in Tecumseh.

Boone, whose food pantry is located downtown, founded City of Refuge Ministries in 2014. In 2022, he moved the Meal Assistance Program into the former Hamblin building on East Logan and since then has been working to develop a smoother way to deliver food to the hungry.

“We wanted something to simplify that and give people a better connection and make pantry food more accessible to our community,” he said. “So we developed an app.”

The app has allowed Boone to give choices to clients, part of the organization’s “waste elimination” program. It also has provided the program with the ability to see what foods were popular with different groups.

“That way, we weren’t giving people things that they wouldn’t use,” he said. “It allowed us to really hone in on the foods that were popular and to not waste dollars purchasing foods that people weren’t familiar with or that they wouldn’t use. It also gave the community instant contact with us. Right now have over 2,000 users in our county.”

Boone said 90 percent of the food at CRM comes from the Southern Michigan Food Bank. Tecumseh is the second-largest of the Lenawee County communities to receive food, with 16 percent of the 125,917 pounds of food delivered by the CRM food assistance program delivered to Tecumseh residents in 2023. The need is growing, Boone said. The app allows them to really capture the number of people in individual demographics as well as the number of households. Food is delivered or picked up every two weeks.

The app also helped with creating a delivery service for those with transportation barriers. Because they were “intentional” in developing the app, it is user friendly and allows the meal assistance program to better track and meet the food needs of the community. It also allows the food pantry to be able to get the word out quickly when it receives a delivery of something special.

“We  received a donation of fresh produce from ProMedica and simply sent out a message through the app to notify our clientele that we had fresh produce available and fruit,” Boone said. “Within 15 minutes of that information going out through the app, we began to see individuals from the community come out to our facility to get produce that was donated to us. It was gone within an hour.”

The expansion of services at CRM’s food pantry over the years is a bellwether of the problems faced both during the pandemic and as the nation has returned to “business as usual.”

“Right now, we are one of the largest pantries in the county and we’re hoping to exceed that and we’re hoping to have reach into every city and in every village in Lenawee County within the next five years,” he said. “That’s our goal.”

Nagle’s presentation underscored the continuing need for services to help those living in reduced circumstances. He focused on data collected through state and federal programs as well as from those visiting Hickman Hospital. His role is to oversee ProMedica’s community health strategy across all of its hospitals. The data showed the health needs of the community, but also revealed that there are a number of residents living at or below federal poverty levels, burdened by the majority of their income going toward housing and transportation. Nagle said this information is helpful in discovering the “root causes and drivers” of those needs in the community.

“If we look at populations living at 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold, the City of Tecumseh has 16.5 percent of its residents living in low income situations,” he said. “We do see that there’s 7 percent of households actively receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, but 2 percent of those households that are living in poverty that do not receive those food supports. When it comes to transportation, we do see 5 percent of households are without a vehicle at all, and just over 40 percent that have one vehicle dedicated to the entire household.”

Additionally, 6 percent of households in Tecumseh have no internet, and about a third of household income is spent on transportation. That translates into less money for food and utilities for those in lower-income households.

“We’re seeing that a quarter of people’s income is being spent on housing specifically,” he said. “So over 50 percent of household income values or median household income is being spent on transportation and housing alone. When we’ve looked at individuals that are low income, we’re seeing that 80 percent, sometimes higher than 100 percent of people’s income are just being spent on those two factors alone, leaving no expendable income for their other basic needs. Some of these other data points that we see are for the monthly rent ranges, we’re seeing the highest percentage of those between $500 a month to above $1,000.”

Nagle said that data available doesn’t always reflect what he called the “granular level” for the city, which means it is more difficult to know the rate of homelessness in the community. However, “we do have a continuum of care” locally, which is working on homelessness and housing initiatives for the county.

Councilmember Austin See commented on his experience with the Continuum of Care and its efforts on behalf of the homeless and those living in encampments.

“Continuum of Care was talking a few months ago about the fact that, when we went out to these camps and we talk to the homeless population about whether they’re chronically homeless or couch surfing, there’s different kinds of homelessness,” he said. “Something that I found alarming in Tecumseh was we had 58 homeless minors in Tecumseh.  So they’re not chronically homeless, they’re not living in encampments, but they don’t have a place to call their own. They don’t have a bed. So that’s something that’s been kind of alarming because 58 children were technically homeless.”

Nagle said this information is the kind of feedback ProMedica is looking for because it gets at that granular level of community needs.

“That piece of feedback alone is so important for us to know because if we only looked at the HUD data to determine what the homelessness needs are in the community, it comes back as null,” he said.  “We don’t have that data for Tecumseh specifically. And if we look at the county perspective, it’s going to show there’s 158 people in county that are experiencing homelessness and that 100 percent of them are sheltered. This is local feedback and context from lived experience and from people working directly in the field that help us to know the real time situation is much bigger than what that data showed.”