🚚 When Trucks Full of Food Get Stranded and Seniors Choose Medicine Over Meals | BUCKMASTER 5.23.25
Sahuarita Food Bank director reveals why America's hunger crisis requires community innovation over Congressional compassion
Based on the Buckmaster Show for 5/23/25, a daily radio show in Tucson, AZ, interviewing local newsmakers. Analysis and opinions are my own.
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
👧🏾✊🏾👦🏾
Carlos Valles runs food banks that help people who don't have enough food, but he discovered something important: just giving people food doesn't solve the real problem. 🥫 So he started teaching welding and computer skills, helping people file their taxes to get money back, and even driving a big mobile classroom to places where people can't travel to get help.
🧑🏭💻🚐 While politicians in Washington make it harder for hungry people to get food stamps, Carlos and his team are actually solving problems by helping people learn new skills so they don't need the food bank anymore. 🏛️❌🥪 It's like the difference between giving someone a fish every day versus teaching them how to fish so they can feed themselves forever. 🎣💡
🗝️ Takeaways
🍎 771 kids depend on weekend food backpacks because school meals are the only guaranteed nutrition they get
💰 Congressional budget cuts to SNAP will force more people into food bank lines that are already overwhelmed
🏗️ A food bank's vocational school is more effective at job training than most government programs
🚛 Food distributors literally negotiate with food banks over stranded trucks while people go hungry
👥 22 people graduated from emergency food assistance to economic independence through skills training
📱 A mobile classroom designed by necessity brings services to rural communities that the government ignores
💳 Poor people often have good credit – they think they don't because society tells them they should
🍞 When Food Banks Fill the Gaps That Failing Systems Create: A Conversation with Carlos Valles
Guest host Dan Shearer sits down with the executive director of Sahuarita and Marana Food Banks to discuss how community organizations are picking up the pieces where government and capitalism fall short.
While Bill Buckmaster enjoyed his well-deserved vacation, guest host Dan Shearer from the Green Valley News stepped into the studio this past Friday to tackle one of our communities' most pressing issues: food insecurity in an allegedly affluent nation.
His guest, Carlos Valles, executive director of both the Sahuarita and Marana Food Banks and Community Resource Centers, provided a sobering yet inspiring look at how grassroots organizations are doing the heavy lifting that our systems seem incapable of managing.
The Hunger Games: When Seniors Choose Between Food and Medicine
Six and a half years into his tenure at the Sahuarita Food Bank, with an additional Marana operation under his belt since December 2023, Carlos Valles has become something of an expert in American contradictions. He's watching the supposedly golden generation – those seniors who lived through the "prosperous" post-war decades – forced into impossible choices that would make Sophie weep.
"I get transportation this week and I'm going to hit the food bank," Valles recounted, channeling the voice of seniors who've become transportation strategists out of necessity. "And probably that's the only thing. And I'll miss out on my medical appointment, and I'll do that another week when I get transportation again."
Let that sink in. In the wealthiest nation in human history, elderly Americans are playing scheduling roulette with their health because they can't afford both food and medical care in the same week.
The cruel arithmetic is devastatingly simple.
"We have families that come to the food bank during the summer months and they're like, hey, can we get some kid friendly things?"
Valles explained, describing how school meal programs create a summer cliff that drops children into food insecurity. When school ends, so does guaranteed nutrition for 771 kids enrolled in their backpack program across 11 schools, all qualifying for free or reduced lunch.
"It's a bag that goes in a backpack. And it's by design. It's hidden in the backpack because there is a stigma for taking food home," Valles described with matter-of-fact precision that masks the heartbreak of children learning shame alongside their ABCs.
Because apparently, we've decided that hungry children should feel bad about being hungry. Peak American values right there.
The numbers tell a story of systematic failure disguised as individual responsibility. Valles cited increasing rents, mortgages, and energy costs and the simple reality that "it's more expensive to buy a home now than it was not too long ago." For seniors on fixed incomes and families teetering on the economic edge, a $200 rent increase isn't belt-tightening—it's choosing between shelter and sustenance.
"We have a veteran service officer. And so we've seen a lot of veterans that are looking at potentially increasing their disability because they're getting all priced on a lot of basic necessities," Valles noted, adding another layer to the American dream deferred.
Veterans. The people we allegedly "support our troops" for are getting priced out of basic necessities. But hey, at least we have those yellow ribbon magnets on our SUVs.
Congressional Cuisine: How Washington Serves Up Austerity
While Valles navigates real-world hunger, Congress plays its favorite game: punishing the poor for the crime of being poor. The budget bill winding through Washington would tighten SNAP restrictions, extending work requirements to age 65 (up from 54) and adding new barriers for parents with children under seven.
Nothing says "pro-family values" like making it harder for struggling families to feed their children. The same legislators who clutch their pearls about "protecting children" are apparently fine with protecting them from food.
"We are certainly going to see an increase along with all of the other food banks, emergency food-related organizations across the country," Valles predicted with the weary tone of someone who's seen this movie before. "I'm not sure how many of them are going to be able to sustain a big increase."
The approximately 42 million Americans who receive SNAP benefits – roughly one in eight people – face the specter of additional hoops to jump through in the name of rooting out "waste, fraud, and abuse." That's Washington-speak for "we assume poor people are lying cheaters until proven otherwise."
The Bootstrap Paradox: Innovation Born from Desperation
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Valles' operation is how it's accidentally become more effective at workforce development than most government programs. The Saguaro Skills Center – a fully licensed vocational school through the Arizona Board of Private Post-Secondary Education – represents revolutionary thinking disguised as practical necessity.
"We do not want to offer someone a welding certificate that's coming from a food bank because then if they move to another state they're gonna say really a food bank trade you to weld," Valles explained with characteristic directness.
Even when solving problems our broken system creates, organizations have to navigate the stigma our society attaches to poverty.
The results speak louder than any policy paper. "We had a mom who was struggling with her husband. They have four kids, one of whom is a special needs child, and she went from zero to fifty thousand dollars in income," Valles shared, describing a graduate of their Google IT certificates program. She said, "I need a job that I can work from home, and we say, you know, we got a perfect opportunity."
Fifty thousand dollars. That's not just income – that's transformation, dignity, and proof that people don't need lectures about bootstraps, they need actual boots and training on how to use them.
Their first welding cohort graduated three students: "Two have already secured full-time employment. We're working with our third student. He's extremely introverted, so we're working on those soft skills right now." The July graduation class already has an employer lined up. "He said, "You know what? I want to hire two of your students because I want to, you know, kind of have anchors here in the community."
Imagine that – when you actually invest in people and give them real skills, they succeed. Revolutionary concept.
The organization helped 22 individuals transition completely away from needing emergency food assistance.
"It's yes, the percentage is small, but 22 individuals, you know, put that into a larger economic perspective, you know that's... It's huge," Valles reflected, understanding that each success represents generational change.
Project Azul: When Innovation Meets Desperation
Valles's crown jewel might be Project Azul, a 46-foot mobile unit that he designed himself despite not being "an architect or a designer by trade." Sometimes the best solutions come from people who don't know they're supposed to be impossible.
"It's got a 22-foot classroom space, a 9-foot office, it's got a bathroom, it's got high-speed satellite internet. It's been outfitted with technology," he described with justifiable pride. The unit has facilitated nearly 700 tax returns through the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program, helping people access refunds they didn't know they were owed.
"There were some individuals that were owed some money, so that was a great benefit," Valles understated, describing how free tax preparation revealed money sitting unclaimed because people hadn't filed returns in years. "There were individuals who have not done their tax return in years because they haven't been employed, so they said, you know, for what?"
Because our tax system is so deliberately complex that people give up money they're legally owed rather than navigate the bureaucratic maze. And then we wonder why people don't trust government.
The mobile unit represents more than technology – it's a philosophical statement about meeting people where they are rather than demanding they navigate systems designed to exclude them. "It's really to eliminate again going to that transportation issue," Valles explained, cutting through the academic jargon to the practical reality that if people can't get to services, you bring services to people.
The Ripple Effects of Economic Anxiety
One of the most telling revelations came when Valles described how economic uncertainty cascades through his donor base. "We had a family that was donating about $600 worth of groceries a week. And now they scaled back to about $250 a week. And they said it's just because... Uncertainty. Yeah, the uncertainty."
This is how capitalism's "boom and bust" cycles work in practice – when the economy hiccups, everyone hoards resources, creating the very scarcity they fear.
The food banks source supplies through three channels: community donations, food rescue from grocery stores (averaging 10,000 pounds weekly), and strategic purchasing partnerships. "It's rare that we throw food away. Unless it's completely sure if it's going to make someone sick," Valles noted, describing an operation that would make efficiency experts weep with joy.
They've turned waste streams into revenue streams, collecting "about one hundred and five thousand pounds of cardboard" from online shopping deliveries last year and converting it into funding for their backpack program. Amazon packages funding children's meals—there's a metaphor for late-stage capitalism if ever there was one.
Food Rescue: Capitalism's Contradictions in Action
Perhaps the most surreal moments came when Valles described negotiating over stranded trucks of food. "We did that with three of our other partners. We did that last fall," he explained, describing how smaller food banks pool resources to purchase abandoned shipments.
"The guy was calling from Michigan. He's like, I got a truck and we negotiated over the phone. And I think we got a pretty good deal. He did not seem too happy at the end of the day, but then he called me back and said, you know what, I'm glad because I was going to be losing more money."
Picture this: a Michigan food distributor with a truck full of perfectly good food stranded in Arizona, negotiating with food banks because our distribution system is so broken that food literally sits on the side of the road while people go hungry.
These aren't feel-good anecdotes – they're symptoms of a system so fundamentally broken that brilliant, dedicated people must MacGyver solutions from scraps while Congress debates whether poor people deserve food.
Beyond Band-Aids: Addressing Root Causes
What distinguishes Valles' operation from traditional charity models is its recognition that hunger is often a symptom, not the disease. Their programming includes financial literacy that dispels myths about poverty and credit, tax preparation, childcare resources, and even work boots for people who land jobs but cannot afford proper equipment.
"There's this misconception that poor people have poor credit, and the reality is a lot of them have no credit or they actually have pretty good credit, they just think that because they're poor that they have poor credit," Valles explained, cutting through classist assumptions with data-driven clarity.
Funny how the "personal responsibility" crowd never mentions that maybe, just maybe, the system itself might be the problem.
Their partnership with Vantage West Credit Union brings banking services to people who've been "cashing their paychecks at check cashing places for the last 10 years"—another poverty tax that drains resources from those who can least afford it.
The Expansion Imperative
Currently operating out of 14,300 square feet, Valles dreams of 30,000 square feet to accommodate growing demand and expanding programming. In the last 24 months, their family resource center has served over 380 families with children aged zero to five. "There's not a manual on how to raise a child," Valles noted with characteristic understatement.
Imagine what they could accomplish with proper funding and support. Better yet, imagine a society where such heroic efforts weren't necessary because basic needs were guaranteed rights rather than charitable privileges.
The organization follows federal poverty guidelines but operates on trust rather than surveillance.
"We're not checking, we're not saying you need to bring a paycheck; it's self-declared," Valles explained. Hungry is hungry is hungry, and they're coming, and they say, you know what? I live a mile away."
Revolutionary concept: treating people with dignity instead of suspicion.
The Real Revolution: Community Over Capital
Carlos Valles and organizations like his represent the best of human resilience and community solidarity. They're doing the work that a functioning society should ensure happens systematically rather than charitably. Their success stories are inspiring, but they shouldn't be necessary.
The real story here isn't just about food insecurity – it's about how communities organize to fill gaps created by policy choices that prioritize profit over people. While Congress debates work requirements for food assistance, real communities are creating pathways out of poverty through education, skills training, and wraparound services.
This is what mutual aid looks like when it's done right – not charity that maintains power structures, but community organizing that challenges them.
In these challenging times, stories like Carlos Valles' remind us that ordinary people doing extraordinary work can create real change. While we fight for better systems, we can take heart in knowing that communities are rising to meet the moment with creativity, compassion, and unwavering commitment to human dignity.
The future may depend less on what happens in Washington and more on what happens in communities like Sahuarita and Marana, where dedicated people refuse to accept that hunger and poverty are inevitable.
How to Get Involved:
Support the Sahuarita Food Bank at www.SahuaritaFoodBank.org, the Saguaro Skills Center, or the Marana location at mfb-crc.org. Volunteer, donate, or simply spread the word about their innovative programming.
And if you value this kind of in-depth analysis of the issues that matter to our communities, please consider supporting Three Sonorans Substack. Independent journalism that connects the dots between policy and people's lives doesn't happen without reader support. Your subscription keeps this critical coverage coming.
What Do You Think?
How might our communities look different if we invested in comprehensive support systems rather than treating symptoms of poverty through charity? Have you witnessed similar innovation in your area where community organizations are doing the work that the government should be doing?
What would happen if we took just a fraction of our military budget and invested it in programs like the Saguaro Skills Center?
Share your experiences, ideas, and thoughts in the comments below. Let's build a conversation about what real solutions look like.
Quotes:
Carlos Valles: "We do not want to offer someone a welding certificate that's coming from a food bank because then if they move to another state, they're gonna say, really, a food bank trained you to weld" - On having to create credentialed programs due to societal stigma
Carlos Valles: "I get transportation this week, and I'm going to hit the food bank. And probably that's the only thing. And I'll miss out on my medical appointment," - Describing impossible choices seniors face
Carlos Valles: "There's this misconception that poor people have poor credit and the reality is a lot of them have no credit or they actually have pretty good credit" - Debunking classist assumptions
Carlos Valles: "We had a mom who was struggling... she went from zero to fifty thousand dollar income" - On the transformative power of skills training
Carlos Valles: "Hungry is hungry is hungry" - On serving people without judgment
Dan Shearer: "And last thing you want to do is suggest that people who are on snap or have to come to the food bank... are not responsible, but there is a sense that you take ownership" - Revealing internalized conservative framing
Names Mentioned:
Carlos Valles - Executive Director of Sahuarita and Marana Food Banks and Community Resource Centers, 6.5 years of experience
"22 individuals... You know, put that into a larger economic perspective... It's huge."
Dan Shearer - Editor of Green Valley News and Sahuarita Sun, guest hosting for Bill Buckmaster
Conducted the interview, asked policy-focused questions
Bill Buckmaster - Regular host of the show, on vacation
Show creator, returning after Memorial Day
Tom Fairbanks - Producer and engineer for the show
Behind-the-scenes technical support
Representative Juan Ciscomani - Congressional District 6 representative
Valles: "He knows what we need. He's been out to our two food bank locations, and he has seen the need"
The interview focused primarily on Valles' expertise and experiences, with Shearer as an informed interviewer who understood local politics and federal policy implications.
Have a scoop or a story you want us to follow up on? Send us a message!
