LANSING, Mich.—It should be said up top: I have found a stimulus project that has not created a single job. Nor has it saved any. Twenty-thousand dollars have gone to the Lansing chapter of Volunteers of America to restock their food kitchen, and according to the Obama administration’s rubric, it should be a failure of a stimulus project. The $20,000 comes from FEMA via the United Way, and it has gone toward buying more goods for the food pantry here, where they've served 85,439 meals this year, a 9 percent increase from last year. Next year, they’re aiming to serve 100,000 meals. Because when you're a homeless shelter/food pantry in Michigan, the community’s need isn’t going to ebb any time soon.

So now the complicated question: If the stimulus is supposed to create and/or save jobs, does that mean we don’t want to fund anything that doesn’t do that? The $20,000, of course, pales in comparison to the huge pot of $499 billion of nontax stimulus monies being doled out. Patrick, the VP of operations who showed us around, isn’t shy about saying there weren’t any jobs created. And presumably he’ll have to write that into his report on what he’s doing with his stimulus dollar. But the money has already been obligated to Volunteers of America (it hasn’t actually been paid, despite being due a week ago, but that’s a separate story), so it’s not like the government is going to pull back the funds. But the fact remains: This is a stimulus project that is not creating or saving any jobs.

But I’m not sure that that’s a reason to stop these kinds of funds. The work that these people are doing is good work. It’s necessary work. It’s work that has everything to do with the recession. Without the 14.9 percent unemployment rate in Michigan, the pantry wouldn’t have such an increased load. And the stimulus is supposed to counteract the recession. So it’s doing its job there.

Unfortunately, the $20,000 is marked as stimulus money, so it has an extra responsibility to work harder. It has the expectations of a nation weighing it down, demanding that it does more than just help create something but also that it helps employ somebody new to create that something. But these are distinctions that mean little to the kitchen at Volunteers of America. They’ve got an extra $20,000 and an extra 20,000 people to feed. That responsibility is clear cut.

(Photos by David Backer.)

For more on Recessionary Road's trip to Lansing, see dispatches on Michigan's stimulus czar, youth workers renovating an old school into a community center, and a sewer project in the middle of the city. For posts from outside of Lansing, visit the RR blog.