Country Neighbor distributes produce

ORWELL – As prices rise, people are forced to make difficult decisions between which groceries are necessities and those that might not be.
Country Neighbor endeavored to help in that decision with a food distribution at its headquarters in Orwell on Monday, April 13.
“So far, I’ve kind of watched people coming through,” Country Neighbor Executive Director Barb Klingensmith said. “We serve a lot of senior citizens. In fact, I was just doing a grant application, and last year, in 2025, more than 65 percent of the individuals that utilize the food pantry, or mobile pantries, were children and seniors. Forty-four percent were senior citizens. Seniors are some of the hardest hit, because they’re a fixed income, so when gas prices are up and grocery store prices are up, they can’t get another job to subsidize. And, young families, I mean, people who are working, they’re struggling. When you start to have some of the way prices are, every little bit helps.”
“This helps so much,” Klingensmith continued. “It helps stretch those dollars. I think it’s very critical to help them kind of stretch and to have fresh produce.”
Country Neighbor distributed eggs, tomatoes, oranges, greens, bananas, avocados and strawberries.
“Sometimes, some of them, if they have to make a choice, between a loaf of bread, a half-gallon of milk or a bag of fruit, they’re going to take bread or milk,” Klingensmith said.
To date in 2026, Country Neighbor has hosted more than a dozen distributions at a number of sites throughout Ashtabula County.
“We do them all over the county,” Klingensmith said. “With all the other sites, I would say, because some of them do them every month, we hosted more than three dozen last year. So far this year, we’ve had 12-15 between the sites.”
A large number of people receive assistance through the distributions.
“It depends on which site it is, but here, when we do it, we generally do around 100 households, so that’s averaging 400-500 people,” Klingensmith said. “Some of the sites do 200 households with 700-800 people.”
It takes an army of volunteers to assist so many people.
“A lot of them have all volunteers, so they have their volunteer team that does it,” Klingensmith said. “These are volunteers here today and we’ve got a couple of youthOPPORTUNITIES! kids that came down to help us. On my staff, they’re all volunteering their time. They’re done with their day, so they’re volunteering their time to do it.”
The produce distributed comes from a number of places.
“Most of it is our donations that we get,” Klingensmith said. “I work with different wholesalers and different companies that donate. They might have strawberries. The shipment comes in and maybe one container is bad, so they reject the whole shipment. They’ll send them over to us and we’ll look them over and the rest of them are good. Some of the things are close-dated. We’ll get a variety of different things. Some of the things are commodities, government commodities, like oranges. It depends, it’s just a variety.”
There have been no recent changes to the program, but Klingensmith has been keeping her eye on some things that may force her to make some adjustments.
“Usually, around July or so, we might see some changes coming through,” Klingensmith said. “But, the other thing, too, that I am waiting to see what the impact is, but what they did was, people on public assistance have to work some for their benefits. That stuff went into effect in April, so I’m kind of waiting to see the impact that might have.”
The next food distribution at Country Neighbor has not been scheduled yet, but there will be more coming.
“We’ll decide, because now we start them in the springtime, we do them here often,” Klingensmith said.