Military families turn to food pantries to survive in NYC

Jaime Billert grew up in a military family and thought she knew the meaning of “sacrifice” — but nothing prepared her for a transfer to New York City, where she often goes without meat for her growing family because they can’t afford the price of groceries.

“It’s grossly more expensive here,” said Billert, 31, who lives in base housing on Staten Island with her three children and husband Kyle, who is in the US Coast Guard. “It’s really all-encompassing, because when you move as a military family you no longer have the family connections that you could rely on for things like childcare.”

Billert, who is currently eight months pregnant (“I’m due on St. Patrick’s Day!” she said), moved with her family in 2019 from northern Illinois, where she worked as a high-school science teacher.

She now stays at home with her children, who are 9, 4, and 2, because daycare is prohibitively expensive in New York City, she said. And they stay close to home because gasoline is too pricey for the family’s budget of $900, including diapers and food. Even so, Billert said, that only allows for four gallons of milk for her children.

So she supplements the family’s meals with twice-monthly visits to a local food pantry set up for active-duty military and veterans in Staten Island.

Food insecurity among active duty military personnel across the country is a growing problem that now affects more than 25 percent of military families, according to a recent study from the Rand Corporation.

“This is something that should never, ever happen to our military,” said Linda Ollis, who runs the non-profit SSG Michael Ollis Freedom Foundation in honor of her son Michael Ollis, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2013. The Staten Island-based foundation helps veterans as well as active-duty military families, and has contributed to the Fort Wadsworth Food and Essential Closet that is patronized by Billert and other military families on Staten Island.

“It’s an indignity that has to stop,” Ollis told The Post. “When one member of a military family serves, the whole family serves.”

Andie Coakley agrees. A Coast Guard veteran, she runs the Ford Wadsworth pantry and is the New York Tri-State Chapter Director for Blue Star Families, a national non-profit that helps military families. The mother-of-four told The Post that, since its inception in January 2022, the food bank, which is open twice per month and backed by local charities on Staten island, has helped more than 2,300 military families.

“Food insecurity has a lot of misnomers about it,” said Coakley, 48. “People say that military families don’t know how to manage their money, but you have to remember that these families are moving every two to four years. A military spouse has to give up a job, find a new job wherever they go, and pay a lot in moving expenses. We have families who move from a place with a low cost of living and they come to a place like New York where insurance for their car suddenly triples, and they ask themselves: ‘What just happened? We thought we were fine.’”

Although the pantry is open to both active duty personnel and veterans from the tri-state area, many are reluctant to admit that they need the help, Coakley said. As a result, she has tried to turn the space into more of a community hub, where veterans can find information about benefits and family members of active-duty military personnel can find out about local jobs with Amazon and other companies.

Part of the problem, one critic said, is that the military pays “a living allowance that falls short of what the actual cost of living requires … [that] can make things extremely hard for military members to stay afloat and provide for their family stationed here.”

Many of the families who use the pantry can’t actually afford to live on Staten Island, and are spread out in New Jersey, said Coakley, whose husband, Joe, works in marine enforcement in the Coast Guard.

“The stigma associated with using food assistance programs was a barrier noted by stakeholders, as was a general lack of knowledge about programs and eligibility requirements, long application processes and limited food pantry hours,” noted the January 2023 study by the Rand Corporation, a public policy think tank.

Last year, Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella and US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand held a press conference to raise awareness of the economic difficulties faced by active-duty military personnel in New York.

“Our family has been stationed in the NJ/NY area for a few years now,” wrote an anonymous pantry patron to Coakley in an email shared with The Post this week. “As each year that passes we have been impacted by the cost of living expenses that are continually rising.  We are now a family of six, and on top of [a] mortgage increase we noticed a significant increase in our weekly grocery bill but yet we had not changed what we were purchasing for the house. Thankfully, we have had the resource of the food pantry on base to lean on which has helped with reducing the overall monthly cost to feed our family.” 

For Billert, who has two brothers in the military, the pantry has been a godsend. She regularly finds chicken, and was thrilled when she recently found donated ground beef patties. “We just snapped those up,” she said.

Through some prodigious penny-pinching, Billert is able to supplement the monthly milk budget for her three children with shelf-stable milk from the Wadsworth pantry, she said.

Her strict budgeting allows the family to pay $80 a month for a local gymnastics program for their 9-year-old and $75 per month for their 4-year-old. But with inflation, sacrifices have increased, she said.

“When gas really hit a high, we really cut back,” Billert said. “We just made the decision that we were not going to drive the car, and that we were going to walk or hike in Staten Island.” Her husband biked or walked to his job on the base after gasoline topped $5 per gallon earlier this year, she said.

With a new baby on the way, Billert worries about the future, she said.

“How do we make sure that we put money aside for our children’s education?” she said. “How do we set ourselves up for that?”