Inside Oregon Food Bank: A Conversation with Itsa Ortiz

For Itsa Ortiz, an early memory lies at the core of her passion to end hunger. “This is one of the first memories I have of us experiencing food insecurity,” Itsa shares. “My dad was sick with cancer and so he wasn't working. We were able to get food stamps, which at the time came as vouchers in a little booklet.”

Itsa remembers being in line at the grocery store as her mother pulled out the little blue vouchers to pay.

“I remember I saw the cashier's demeanor change, almost out of annoyance. And I remember looking back at the line of people behind us, and they also were annoyed. And I could sense that my mom was suddenly very flustered and upset. I could see her hands shaking as she was trying to very gently tear the vouchers off without tearing them apart.”

Today, Itsa recognizes that her family was not alone in this experience, that the systemic inequities that cause hunger are not a personal failing. Growing up as a first-generation Mexican American of immigrant parents, she speaks about how her and her family’s experience with overt and covert racism led to housing and food insecurity throughout her life. And she speaks openly about these experiences in hopes that others who face hunger might feel less stigma and shame.

Itsa recalls going home with her mom after their experience in the grocery store. “My mom was so upset. I remember she went home and told my dad, ‘I don't wanna go to the grocery store again. It’s so embarrassing. Everyone was so judgmental. I hate these things.’ She was incredibly upset. And my dad said, ‘Well, we need them. I'm not working. How else are we going to eat?’”

“I became very upset because I felt like we were being judged. People are on SNAP benefits because they need them. There’s still so much stigma — people don’t understand that they're a necessity. If the government actually did something about reducing the wage gap and increasing minimum wage, then we wouldn't need them. But here we are.”

Today, Itsa is the Associate Director of Equity and People Operations at Oregon Food Bank. While Itsa does the important (and often behind the scenes) labor of keeping internal systems running, she is also a trusted person, there to help staff navigate the workplace with compassion and connection. Itsa brings 10 years of HR experience and professional talent to her role, but she also shares how her lived experience is inextricable to her ability to support staff.

“In HR, there aren’t a lot of people like me,” she says. “It can be difficult to relate and share experiences with someone who doesn't know anything about being first generation Mexican American, coming from immigrant parents, and everything that entails. You grow up quickly when you have parents who don't speak a lot of English, who need you to help them navigate a foreign land and a foreign language.”

She recalls how important this representation was to her early in her career. Working at an agricultural company in California’s Central Valley, she had the rare opportunity to sit on an HR team of all Latine professionals. “I had never worked with a group of people at that high level of professionalism. It was exciting to see other people who looked like me, who had the same experiences as me working in such high level jobs.”

Itsa knows what it’s like to join a workplace without knowing how to navigate leave, benefits and other resources. She points out how for those of us who have experienced generational hunger and poverty, we might never have learned how to open a savings account, navigate healthcare options, open a retirement account or ask for paid time off.

“It can be really difficult to go to someone who has experienced generational wealth, who has never had to deal with food insecurity or housing insecurity and say, ‘Hey, I don't know how to open a bank account,’ and then be made to feel small or insignificant. So for me, it's important to be someone who people can relate to. It’s important to have people in HR who have a shared lived experience. I may not look exactly like you, but I hope you feel comfortable talking to me about things that might seem normal to other people, but aren't to you. Maybe your parents don’t know how to open a Roth IRA because they never had a Roth IRA. I don’t say ‘How do you not know this?’ I say, ‘You know what? I didn’t know this either. I learned and we’ll learn together.’”

Prior to Oregon Food Bank, Itsa worked for Immigration Counseling Service, a nonprofit immigration attorney service supporting family reunification and asylum cases. She worked there when DACA was introduced. “It was a big deal for all of our clients’ children who had no pathway to any kind of legal access. It was really fulfilling work, especially having such close ties to the immigrant community with my parents being immigrants themselves.”

Even years later, Itsa’s passion shines through as she recalls supporting people in her community: “One of the best feelings you could ever have was letting people know that their employment authorization card was in, that they got their green card, or that they were now a naturalized citizen. I still remember the first time I saw the look of a client when they got their EAD card. They were like, ‘Oh my God, does this mean I can work?’ And I said, ‘You can work. You can apply for services. In a few years you can apply for a green card, and then after that you can become a citizen. There's so many opportunities for you now.’ It was amazing.”

For Itsa, these professional experiences are inextricable from her lived experience, and it is from these experiences that her passion for ending food insecurity has blossomed. Ending hunger means so much more than just getting food on the table. Itsa says that holding the most vulnerable communities at the forefront is what drew her to Oregon Food Bank.

“Oregon Food Bank has made internal changes to continue to put the community that we serve at the forefront and to make them the priority. That really speaks to our mission. If we’re serving a community, and our goal is to be community-oriented, we need to lead with actions and not just words. Oregon Food Bank does that, and it’s a really beautiful thing.”

One of the ways we center people experiencing hunger is by believing that each person in our community is deserving of culturally-relevant, dignified, abundant access to food. Itsa recalls her own experiences at food pantries, and she shares what a difference it would have made to have abundant access to the food her family was familiar with.

The local church had a food pantry and it was great. It helped us get additional food. But my family is Mexican. They gave us cans of beets, and we took them, because we’re not going to argue with free food. But my mom had never eaten a beet and certainly never cooked with them. And those beets sat in our pantry for 13 years. It would have been nice to have more culturally appropriate food.

But Itsa has also had times in her life when relying on food assistance was not looked down upon or stigmatized.

“I was in my early twenties and I was barely making any money,” she says. “There were times where I either had $30 to fill up my gas tank or to buy groceries, and I needed gas to get to work so that I could pay my bills. So I would go to the food pantry with a couple friends who lived in the same apartment complex. We would wait in line and we would get the basic necessities, and then we would have food pantry dinners and make meals together. And I was really lucky — I worked for some amazing employers and they were very non-intrusive. They could see that there was something going on, but they never were overt about it. They would say, ‘We're gonna buy you lunch today.’ Or I had a coworker who would suddenly say, ‘I made way too much lunch — do you want the extra?’ I was very lucky that I had some people who were looking out for me, but also were trying not to make me feel bad in any way.”

Itsa’s story reminds us that food justice centers people in their daily, lived experience. It means that communities have power over our own food systems and that we are able to make decisions about what we grow, produce, distribute and consume. When we envision communities who never know hunger, we envision communities who can access food with safety and dignity.

“From my experience — being the child of immigrants who were not documented for some time — a lot of it is rooted in fear. My mom has been an American citizen for almost a decade. She was a legal permanent resident for over 20 years prior to that. And she still is fearful of utilizing any kind of resources, that she is going to get her citizenship revoked. For my family and a lot of other immigrant families, there is fear of deportation, being found, being separated from your family. As I became older and started utilizing food pantries, I realized, this is my right. I shouldn't be afraid to utilize a benefit or any kind of program that is meant to help me. There's so much stigma around poverty, but it's something that's created by our own country. And it’s something that can be solved.”