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Food Pantries Empty While Thrift Stores Thrive

Karen Haren is standing in the Harvesters warehouse in Kansas City.
Frank Morris
Karen Haren is standing in the Harvesters warehouse in Kansas City.

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kcur/local-kcur-781021.mp3

Kansas City, MO – The troubled economy is driving thousands of people into food pantries for the first time ever this year. At the same time donations to those pantries are drying up and some have run out of food entirely, even here, in the nation's breadbasket. But while the economic hard times are pummeling food pantries, they're doing great things for another service catering to the poor thrift stores. KCUR's Frank Morris reports.

I’ve been at KCUR almost 30 years, working partly for NPR and splitting my time between local and national reporting. I work to bring extra attention to people in the Midwest, my home state of Kansas and of course Kansas City. What I love about this job is having a license to talk to interesting people and then crafting radio stories around their voices. It’s a big responsibility to uphold the truth of those stories while condensing them for lots of other people listening to the radio, and I take it seriously. Email me at frank@kcur.org or find me on Twitter @FrankNewsman.
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