Kristi Schoff has experienced food insecurity in the Northside. Now she helps fight it.

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At four in the afternoon, long after the students had gone home, a few people still filtered in and out of Dr. Edwin E. Weeks Elementary School in Syracuse’s Northside neighborhood.

Inside the colorful brick building situated on a hilly, tree-lined stretch of Hawley Avenue, the food pantry at Syracuse Northeast Community Center remained open. Kristi Schoff, as usual, was there to greet its patrons.

Schoff, who runs the pantry, knows this community well. She’s lived in the Northside for 14 years. She walks the same streets as her clients, sends her kids to the same schools and works a second job at a dollar store where some of them shop.

“I’m ground-level in the neighborhood,” Schoff said, sitting not far from the doors where patrons entered. “I’m no different. No judgment, not looking down on anybody.”

Schoff doesn’t look down on anybody, she said, in part because she knows what it’s like. Before she ran this pantry, she relied on it to help feed herself and her six children. She has experienced from both sides the food insecurity that runs deep through this neighborhood.

So in March, when pandemic-era SNAP benefits expired, Schoff — a SNAP recipient herself — knew what it would mean for her clients. She’s felt the stress of always searching for the next meal and the stigma that often comes with seeking help.

More than that, she said she understands the frustration that comes with relying on a convoluted system that can change on the whim of far-off politicians and that seems to penalize people the moment they get ahead.

“All this stress is back on families that were given a little bit of self-sufficiency,” Schoff said. “And then it was just ripped away from them.”

Lived experience

When you’re hungry, pantry schedules start to set the rhythm of your days, while federal benefits set the rhythm of your months.

For years, that rhythm has been part of Schoff’s life.

For people experiencing food insecurity, finding meals can feel like a full-time job, she said. The hours spent budgeting, planning, researching, applying for assistance and making trips to the food pantry can consume whatever free hours they have left between work and childcare. When you and your kids don’t have enough to eat, everything else becomes a second priority.

This dynamic is what pastor Alicia Wood, whose university-area church hosts one of the largest pantries in the city, calls the “state of scarcity” — the stress of constantly living on the edge of hunger.

“If you can’t feed your kid before they go to school, that’s the worst feeling in the world,” Schoff said. “You can’t focus on anything else that needs to happen in your life.”

Schoff admitted that while pantries like the one at SNCC offered immense support, she found herself torn between the need to get help and the stigma that comes with asking for it.

Cassandra Roshu | Photo Editor

When Schoff’s six children were younger and she stayed home to care for them, pantries like the one at SNCC offered invaluable support. But she also found herself torn between the need to get help and the stigma that comes with asking for it.

“When I did feel like that, I hated it,” Schoff said. “I was self-conscious. I would go to the pantry with my sister-in-law so I wasn’t by myself.”

Those feelings of judgment and condescension can deter people from seeking assistance, she said. And it’s something Schoff strives to avoid at SNCC by being a familiar face, somebody her patrons know has been there before.

Schoff’s kids are older now, with the youngest two attending the elementary school right next door. Sometimes they visit her at the center, and she occasionally pops in during the school day to say hello.

Once her children started attending school, Schoff was able to get her GED diploma, and she had the time to start working. But, like so many other people navigating SNAP, she felt like the program punished her for getting ahead.

“The second you tell them you have any type of income, it’s almost an immediate cut,” she said.

It’s the catch-22 of SNAP benefits: once you start to find your financial footing, the system pulls the support out from under you. What’s left, Schoff said, is a large swath of people making too much to qualify for substantial assistance but not enough to truly get by.

“Now that you started working, and you’re not quite on your feet, but you’re almost there — what now?” Schoff asked. “People don’t want to feel punished for doing the right thing, and some people feel like they’re being punished.”

“The system is broken,” she said.

The limited income Schoff still receives from SNAP goes to feeding her children. It’s not much for a family of eight, she said, but it still helps.

Schoff’s familiarity with the system made it all the more heartbreaking to see the pandemic-era benefits end, and her clients’ food budgets evaporate. So many of them, she said, didn’t need the pantry when the benefits were in place. For a brief moment, they could trust — at least more than they could before — that there would be food to put on the table each night.

Now those clients are returning to SNCC, creating a new wave of demand that, combined with rising food costs, has strained the pantry’s resources. The month before the cuts, SNCC had 97 clients, Schoff said. In the month after, it had 119.

SNCC is one of many. Pantries across Syracuse reported a similar spike in demand shortly after the end of pandemic benefits, said Mike Watrous, agency relations manager for the Food Bank of Central New York.

Schoff has responded to the need as she always has: by trying to meet people where they are. All of her experience with the food pantry, with SNAP and with the complexities of food insecurity feed back into her work at the center.

Following the end to panderic-era SNAP benefits, the SNCC is experiencing a new wave of demand amid continued scarcity and rising food costs.

Cassandra Roshu | Photo Editor

At home, a list of recipes hangs on her fridge, a repertoire of meals she can make with a handful of affordable ingredients. While planning for them, Schoff said she noticed how difficult it had become to afford healthy ingredients.

“Everything healthy costs ten times more than the bag of chips,” she said.

In response, Schoff is investing even more effort into one of the center’s annual initiatives: a garden to grow fruits, vegetables and herbs to give to patrons.

‘Ground-level in the neighborhood’

The garden next to the center — the one Schoff hopes to fill with fresh greens — was empty that afternoon in late April.

As a few kids played on the opposite curb, she pointed out the work that needed to be done on the vacant plots, the overgrowth that she had to cut away before seeds could go in the ground.

The complex infrastructure of emergency food assistance in New York is reliant on this type of work, often carried out by Schoff and other pantry directors. Grants, supplies and support may filter down from on high, but it all depends on volunteer-based organizations like SNCC to plant the gardens, to meet the clients and to distribute food. The entire system hinges on them and their ability to reach hard-hit communities.

As Schoff laid out her plans for the garden — “We wing it every year,” she said — a man wearing a baseball cap approached her, with a cigarette pinched between his fingers.

He’s one of the pantry’s newer clients, Schoff said, a nice guy who helped tend to the garden last year when it became overgrown. They exchanged greetings, and Schoff asked how he was doing.

“You look good,” she said.

The man nodded. He explained that his hair was coming back since he’d “stopped doing the chemo,” and so was the weight. Eventually, he gestured to the cigarette.

“I’m not gonna light that for you,” Schoff said, half-joking. “You’re almost on school property.”

There are a lot of conversations like that in Schoff’s line of work, she said. She listens to her clients and gets to know their individual needs, but doesn’t try to force help on them that they aren’t ready to accept. She considers them first as neighbors, she said, not as data points or service numbers.

It’s how she would’ve wanted to be treated.

“Honestly, what goes on in the pantry room, people just want a little bit of your time,” she said after the man left, continuing down Hawley Avenue. “They want you to get to know a little bit about them and just see them.”

“To be seen and not be judged — that’s a great feeling.”