Jaime Billert grew up in a military family and thought she knew the meaning of “sacrifice” — but nothing prepared her for a transfer to Recent York City, where she often goes without meat for her growing family because they will’t afford the worth of groceries.
“It’s grossly dearer here,” said Billert, 31, who lives in base housing on Staten Island along with her three children and husband Kyle, who’s within the US Coast Guard. “It’s really all-encompassing, because whenever you move as a military family you now not have the family connections that you might depend on for things like childcare.”
Billert, who’s currently eight months pregnant (“I’m due on St. Patrick’s Day!” she said), moved along with her family in 2019 from northern Illinois, where she worked as a high-school science teacher.
She now stays at home along with her children, who’re 9, 4, and a pair of, because daycare is prohibitively expensive in Recent York City, she said. They usually stay near home because gasoline is just too pricey for the family’s budget of $900, including diapers and food. Even so, Billert said, that only allows for 4 gallons of milk for her children.
So she supplements the family’s meals with twice-monthly visits to a neighborhood food pantry arrange for active-duty military and veterans in Staten Island.
Food insecurity amongst lively duty military personnel across the country is a growing problem that now affects greater than 25 percent of military families, in line with a recent study from the Rand Corporation.
“That is something that ought to never, ever occur 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 in addition to active-duty military families, and has contributed to the Fort Wadsworth Food and Essential Closet that’s 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 entire family serves.”
Andie Coakley agrees. A Coast Guard veteran, she runs the Ford Wadsworth pantry and is the Recent 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 thirty days and backed by local charities on Staten island, has helped greater than 2,300 military families.
“Food insecurity has a whole lot of misnomers about it,” said Coakley, 48. “People say that military families don’t know the way to manage their money, but you could have to keep in mind that these families are moving every two to 4 years. A military spouse has to present up a job, discover a latest job wherever they go, and pay so much in moving expenses. We’ve families who move from a spot with a low price of living and so they come to a spot like Recent York where insurance for his or her automotive suddenly triples, and so they ask themselves: ‘What just happened? We thought we were high-quality.’”
Although the pantry is open to each lively duty personnel and veterans from the tri-state area, many are reluctant to confess that they need the assistance, Coakley said. Because of this, she has tried to show the space into more of a community hub, where veterans can find details about advantages and relations of active-duty military personnel can discover about local jobs with Amazon and other firms.
A part of the issue, one critic said, is that the military pays “a living allowance that falls in need of what the actual cost of living requires … [that] could make things extremely hard for military members to remain afloat and supply for his or her family stationed here.”
Lots of the families who use the pantry can’t actually afford to live to tell the tale Staten Island, and are opened up in Recent Jersey, said Coakley, whose husband, Joe, works in marine enforcement within the Coast Guard.
“The stigma related to using food assistance programs was a barrier noted by stakeholders, as was a general lack of information 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 yr, Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella and US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand held a press conference to boost awareness of the economic difficulties faced by active-duty military personnel in Recent York.
“Our family has been stationed within the NJ/NY area for a couple of years now,” wrote an anonymous pantry patron to Coakley in an email shared with The Post this week. “As every year that passes we’ve been impacted by the fee of living expenses which can be continually rising. We at the moment are a family of six, and on top of [a] mortgage increase we noticed a big increase in our weekly grocery bill but yet we had not modified what we were purchasing for the home. Thankfully, we’ve had the resource of the food pantry on base to lean on which has helped with reducing the general monthly cost to feed our family.”
For Billert, who has two brothers within the military, the pantry has been a godsend. She repeatedly 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 capable of complement 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 neighborhood gymnastics program for his or her 9-year-old and $75 per thirty days for his or her 4-year-old. But with inflation, sacrifices have increased, she said.
“When gas really hit a high, we actually in the reduction of,” Billert said. “We just made the choice that we weren’t going to drive the automotive, and that we were going to walk or hike in Staten Island.” Her husband biked or walked to his job on the bottom after gasoline topped $5 per gallon earlier this yr, she said.
With a latest baby on the way in which, Billert worries in regards to the future, she said.
“How will we be sure that that we put money aside for our kids’s education?” she said. “How will we set ourselves up for that?”