Hunger relief advocates are starting to move beyond their dismay that the USDA will no longer be publishing its annual survey tracking food insecurity, and are starting to consider the various tools that might replace it. The USDA’s Household Food Security Report, thought by many to be a state-of-the-art measure…
Posts published in “Advocacy”
Our annual scan of the website advocacy efforts of the top 100 food banks (by revenue) uncovered a noticeable trend toward food banks seeking to engage visitors in activities related to voting. Their efforts ran the gamut, from passing along basic information on how the government works, to nudging people…
Daily Bread Food Bank of Toronto scored such a big win for the disabled community recently, that now it’s doubling down on its efforts. In July, monthly checks for $200 began showing up in the mailboxes of Canadians with disabilities, thanks largely to the efforts of the food bank, which…
When Second Harvest Heartland of Minneapolis gave itself the goal of cutting hunger in half by 2030, it struggled mightily with defining exactly what success would look like. Would it succeed when people could get the food they needed by going to a pantry or using SNAP? Or would it…
One of the most difficult aspects of advocacy for nonprofits is figuring out where to focus the most energy and attention. Boston-based Project Bread, which promotes food security and food access throughout Massachusetts, recently met this challenge head on. To determine its eight-point legislative agenda for the state’s upcoming 2025-2026…
March was not a good month for food banks. Early in March, food banks found out that $500 million for LFPA, a popular federal program that gives them money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, would go away. Toward the end of the month, they learned that another…
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;…
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…
Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana is expanding a multi-pronged program it developed that aims to lift people out of poverty. A three-year strategic plan, to be initiated this year, will expand the poverty-fighting program into each area of the food bank’s eight-county footprint, one county at a…