Food banks are keeping calm and carrying on amid uncertainty around directives from the new administration that could threaten federal hunger relief programs. The federal government foots the funding for a host of feeding programs, including TEFAP to provide food to food banks; SNAP, the behemoth nationwide nutrition assistance program;…
Food Bank News
There has always been an undercurrent of anxiety among undocumented populations seeking food assistance. Food Bank News noted underground food distributions for the undocumented as far back as 2020, when the pandemic pushed the need for assistance to new heights. Now that anxiety has been ratcheted up, as directives from…
Every food bank leader brings their own set of experiences and perspectives to the role. That is especially true for Cathy Kanefsky who came on as CEO of Food Bank of Delaware nearly four years ago, while raising twin sons with autism. “I walked into this place with eyes that…
During the pandemic, the Minn.-based hunger relief organization Open Cupboard gained two key insights that helped guide the opening of its newest free-food market. The first was that people don’t want to have to answer a lot of questions to gain access to food. The second was that a community’s…
Ideally, Food is Medicine initiatives run by food banks would be funded by the government through Medicaid. But with states moving slowly to adopt the waivers that would make that possible, hospitals have become a major source of support for Food is Medicine efforts. “It’s been all about partnerships and…
Farm-to-food-assistance programs are thriving, according to a report, signaling a new chapter in how communities can address hunger relief. The idea of getting food from local farms to food-insecure people is not necessarily new, but Covid-19 helped to spur additional investment in the practice. Now that the model is taking…
2024 was a big year for Alameda County Community Food Bank. In February, it became one of the first food banks in the country to get paid by an insurer for providing healthy food to patients, marking the start of a Food is Medicine effort that it expects will generate…
Coming out of Covid, many food banks that benefitted from pandemic-era giving and extra government aid directed more funding toward employees, particularly to lift the pay of low-wage workers (see our story here). A few years later, outside aid is now harder to come by, but the work to ensure a…
The CEOs of our Food Bank CEO Roundtable considered how the results of the presidential election might impact charitable and federal food assistance in the coming years. There was concern about the Farm Bill, which continues to be under debate (see our article here) and has important implications for how…