Danielle Brockamp, the manager of Community Connection of Wallowa County in Enterprise, shows the well-stocked freezers of the food bank Wednesday, June 29, 2022.

ENTERPRISE — As trying economic times stretch across the country, it is important to remember that some of the government’s essential services, like food banks, are going through similar struggles.

Surprisingly, those struggles haven’t had a noticeable effect on Community Connection of Wallowa County, a food distribution center in Enterprise.

Danielle Brockamp, the manager of the center, said that effects of recent inflation and rising gas prices aren’t having that much of an impact on the branch.

“I went back the past couple months, and there really hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary,” she said.

Brockamp, who started at Community Connections in April, only noticed that ground beef was becoming harder to obtain and hasn’t seen a huge increase in people served at the moment.

“We have not seen that, yet,” She said. “We have not seen a whole lot of an increase in our food bank usage yet.”

Even though Wallowa County seems fine, the Northeast Oregon Regional Food Bank Manager at Community Connection Audrey Smith has seen a change in her region as a whole, which includes Baker, Grant, Union, and Wallowa counties.

She reported a 7.5% increase in food boxes, which are given out once a month. Also, the food bank has had a 23% increase in produce, bread and grocery rescue boxes. Produce boxes are given out multiple times a month, so the data tends to vary more.

“You have a few extra people coming in to get food boxes, and you have a lot of people that are using our produce and grocery rescue program more often,” she said.

So why is Wallowa County’s food bank not experiencing similar trends? Smith believes that’s because it’s a lot smaller than other locations with just two pantries in Enterprise and Wallowa. The economic impacts may be harder to notice in Enterprise than they are in the region.

“From January through April, we had an average of 124 people come to the pantry, in May we had 155,” she said. “That is a little bit of an increase.”

Brockamp believes that the effects on produce boxes in Wallowa County may not be apparent because of the supply they get from large outside sources.

“Our Harvest Share and our Fresh Alliance that we get from Safeway helps to supplement our food bank … that helps to sustain our fresher foods, the meat and the salads and stuff like that,” she said.

While Brockamp said transportation costs aren’t affecting the Enterprise-based center, Smith said that the region has been renting a U-Haul truck two times a week to transport produce across Eastern Oregon. They are still waiting for a refrigerated truck that they received a grant for in December of last year.

With gas prices exceeding expectations for grants that they received, the cost of renting a U-Haul is really hurting the produce program.

“We’ll continue to do it as long as we can,” Smith said.