Eastern Illinois Food Bank

By Hannah Meisel/For CU-CitizenAccess/ For the past month, the Daily Bread Soup Kitchen at 124 W. White Street in Champaign and other local food pantries have been Katara Raab’s only means of feeding herself and her two-year-old son.

Raab was homeless, bouncing around from place to place every few nights. To make matters worse, she had not received her monthly Link card because the paperwork never came in the mail.  (The Link card makes it possible for her to buy food through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.) Raab may not receive her next Link card for another month.

She recently found housing in Champaign, but she still relies on soup kitchens and food pantries to meet her food needs.

By Landon Cassman/CU-CitizenAccess — Dozens of shivering men and women lined up Saturday at 6 a.m. outside First United Methodist Church, waiting in the season’s first snow for the doors to open so they could get food from the Eastern Illinois Foodbank Foodmobile.

The food pantry wasn’t scheduled to open until 10, but volunteers from the Foodbank and United Way decided that they’d get an early start distributing more than 8,000 pounds of food, enough to feed 150 families.

Eric Westerlund, AFL-CIO Community Services Liaison for the United Way, said the East Central Illinois Building and Construction Trades Council paid the $2,000 fee to bring the Foodmobile to Rantoul.

By Susan Kantor—Betty, a 73-year-old Champaign resident, receives a check from Social Security the third Wednesday of every month. She worked all her life, but without one steady job, she does not receive a pension in retirement.