Mission
The HCFB mission is to “create a well-nourished community.” Located in San Marcos, it has a dedication to Hays county to ensure the community is sustained. They have several programs to make sure their mission is being met. Such programs include resource assistance, nutrition classes, programs with partner agencies, food rescue, and food distributions. The Food Bank employs only 9 employees. Their jobs include Volunteer Services Coordinator, Client Intake Lead, Development and Special Events Coordinator, Communications Coordinator and Operations and Facilities Coordinator. Interns help the coordinators with the behind-the-scenes work, but the food bank relies on volunteers to help with the food distributions (setting up, handling food etc), in the warehouse (organizing food) and with food rescue (retrieving food donations from restaurants and grocery stores around Hays County.
Overview of Duties
My internship for the Spring 2019 is Client Stories. My duties were to collect client interviews and transcribe them. The interviews are then used by my supervisors for testimonials, social media posts, and outreach to garner support for the food bank. Volunteers are critical for daily functions since it is a non-profit organization. The HCFB relies on donations, funding, and volunteers to provide for the community and to continue to operate. These stories that I collect are used to reach people in the community and spread awareness about the food bank throughout Hays County.
In my Client Stories internship, I was exposed to a multitude of operations with the food bank. To begin my internship, I was required to volunteer on two occasions so that I could have a better understanding of what volunteers do for the food bank. The first shift was at a food distribution, the loading and unloading of the food and distributing it to the public. The second was food rescue where we loaded up in vans and went around town to the local Hays county partners and collected food. Food is collected from HEB, Walmart, Sam’s club and many other places and brought back to the food bank for sorting. After my volunteering was over, I began working alongside the Client Intake Leads. This beginning part of my internship was crucial in meeting and socializing with the clients that frequent the distributions. My job for the first two weeks consisted of checking clients in and onboarding new clients into the system. During these weeks, I acclimated myself with the database used to record all the client stories and demographic information. I used this time to read over past interns’ transcriptions, so that I could get a better understanding of what I would need to do. After those introductory weeks, I began collecting interviews.
My Experience
The purpose of the Client Stories internship is to glean information from clients at distributions in order to create testimonials, social media post, “Thank You” letters, all of which show the public who they are donating to. With that purpose in mind, I set out to find people to interview.
I quickly realized, that walking up to people “cold” and asking if you can interview them isn’t for everyone, me included. I helped relieve that stress by building report with clients before asking if I could interview them. This meant going to distributions week after week and chatting with them. After countless rejections, I decided to change my focus to volunteers that are clients. This was less intimidating because I spent most of my time with other volunteers and knew them personally. They also understood the reasoning behind my interviews and were happy to help out the Food Bank. I felt much more comfortable after I started interviewing volunteers. This internship experience was humbling as I realized that interviewing is just not for me. I believe some people who aren’t afraid of rejection or who are particularly good at convincing people of their cause, would better suited for this internship.
Insert picture here: Caption: Me working on transcription in the HCFB Office
The Interview Process: Writing the Interview Guide
It became apparent upon beginning my internship, the interview guide that given to me to use need updating. The initial questions can be found in Appendix A. What I noticed at first, was that the order of the questions seemed illogical. The interview should start with rapport building questions. These questions might not be exactly what you are hoping to glean from the interview, but they get the interviewee comfortable with the process. In Appendix A, the first question asks about the persons name, and then the next question immediately jumps to the meat of the interview. In Appendix B, you can see the changes made by switching the questions that can be easily answered to the beginning of the interview and building up to the question that are more difficult or thought-provoking (Harvard Sociology).
The main question that we needed to ask all clients we interviewed was about food insecurity. I was told when I began the internship that most of the clients interviewed assumed that food insecurity and hunger were synonymous. According to Feeding America (2018), “hunger is a feeling that can be different for everyone, but food insecurity actually measures the conditions that can lead to hunger”. Question 3 from Appendix A leads the client into relating food insecurity to hunger. In Appendix B, I changed the question to include the exact definition of food insecurity so that the client would better understand the question they were answering.
Next, I added probes and extra questions to my guide. These probes serve “to stimulate a respondent to produce more information, without injecting yourself so much into the interaction”. (Bernard, 2006, p. 217). Probes help clients that did not have much to say, I could ask to elaborate more to get them to keep talking.
One of the strategies outlined in Ervin’s “Applied Anthropology: Tools and Perspectives for Contemporary Practice”, 2nd ed, is to ask truly open-ended questions. Avoid asking questions that elicit answers based on a preconceived continuum (Ervin 2005). Question 8 in Appendix A assumes that the Food Bank is providing so much for the client that it frees up their other financial resources. I changed the question to ask more about how coming to the Food Bank has changed their life, so that the question did not focus on money. If they proceeded to tell me about their finances, I could then probe further to reach the conclusion we want out of the question.
Conclusion
During my time at HCFB, I gained skills such as transcribing, interviewing, using recording devices. What I learned from those skills is what is most valuable to me. My ability to pay attention to details was tested and refined through the transcriptions that I was creating. The database that I updated taught me how to use Google sheets and organize data appropriately. These are skills that I used in order to get my next internship. Without my semester with the HCFB, the chances of me being chosen were slim. This internship made me realize that I’m not great at everything. Interviewing may not be my strength, but I learned that holding conversations is. For anyone interested in the Client Stories internship with HCFB, I would recommend prior experience with interviewing or surveying. It is a daunting experience if you have never done it before. But even if you have not, this is a great opportunity to try something new on a small scale. You will learn important skills that can help you in future career searches, or you might find that interviewing is something that you love to do.
Appendix A
1. What is your name?
2. How would you say hunger has impacted our community?
3. Food security is a term often used to describe hunger. What does food insecurity mean to you?
4. Can you tell me about your situation? What led to you receiving food assistance?
5. Can you describe your typical (insert current day of the week)
6. What was it like the first time you received food?
7. Memory of making a meal with the food you received?
8. What can you do with your financial resources now that you’re receiving food assistance?
Appendix B
1. Let’s begin with some general information. What is your name? Where are you from?
2. Could you describe your situation and what led you to needing assistance from the Food Bank?
3. Can you describe to me how you felt the first time you received food from the Food Bank? (probe: How long ago did you start coming to the Food Bank?)
4. Could you describe to me your typical (distribution day of the week)? (probe: How do you feel when you come to (location)?
5. Could you describe to me a memorable moment with the Food Bank?
6. How has coming to the Food Bank affected your life? (probe: What can you do with your financial resources that you couldn’t do before coming to the Food Bank?)
7. Tell me about a time you missed a meal because of lack of food?
8. Do you feel like your diet is healthy? What do you consider a healthy meal?
9. At the Food Bank we use food insecurity to talk about reliable access to healthy food. How do you believe food insecurity has affected Hays County? (probe: who do you think food insecurity affects the most in Hays County?)
References
Bernard, H. R. (2006). Interviewing: Unstructured and Semistructured. In Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira.
Ervin, A. M. (2005). Ethnography: Participant Observation and Key-Informant Interviewing. In Applied Anthropology: Tools and Perspectives for Contemporary Practice. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Strategies for Qualitative Interviews. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/files/sociology/files/interview_strategies.pdf
Understanding Hunger and Food Insecurity. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/food-insecurity