When Mariah heard that SNAP food assistance for her family of six would be frozen for November, the working mom worried about where their meals would come from.
During a shopping trip to the Food Bank, she told us every dollar of their SNAP benefits is crucial to putting food on the table to feed her and her husband’s four growing sons. While Mariah and her husband typically use the Food Bank once a month to stretch their SNAP dollars, they said that through the government shutdown, the No Cost Markets would be their family’s main source of food.
Mariah’s story is one of many that shows the worry and anxiety that so many in Larimer County faced during through the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, which stretched for six weeks and totaled 43 days.
The Food Bank began to see many more people in need starting in October, when news broke that SNAP benefits for the following month would be paused, and federal workers continued to stretch their budgets without paychecks. In fact, we saw three times the typical number of new household sign ups — a jump from 150 to nearly 600 new household signups in a single month.
The amplified need for food resources to support our community continued to be clear in November, when trips to the No Cost Markets spiked by 20% in that first week of the month compared to the first week of September. That’s a leap from 3,100 visits to 3,800.
To keep up with the increased need and ensure that everyone in our community was nourished, the Food Bank purchased more than 170,000 pounds in additional food supply, including meat, milk, eggs and produce – a move that would not have been possible without the incredible support of our Larimer County community.
Knowing that our roughly 120 nonprofit partners would also be seeing mass influxes in need, the Food Bank quickly pivoted to offer grants to our most public-facing agencies so that they could purchase the food needed to keep shelves, and subsequently grocery carts filled.
Each day people continued to reach out and ask: how can I help? Our phones rang and inboxes pinged with inquiries about how to give. Students and community members rallied to host food drives, sometimes collecting thousands of pounds. Local restaurants and businesses offered free services and food to those impacted by the shutdown.
The result was that thousands of our community’s kids, seniors, families, and individuals got to eat.
To each person who contributed, volunteered or helped people find the Food Bank during a time of need, thank you. The support that we received was absolutely critical to ensuring our community was nourished.
While the shutdown is over, new challenges are ahead. With healthcare subsidies currently set to expire at the end of the year, many families are living with great uncertainty and the threat of health insurance premiums as much as doubling. Given this, we anticipate that the need we experienced during the shutdown is a likely preview of what’s to come.
As we move into the new year, we encourage everyone to remain inspired to help those in our community – because if the shutdown showed us anything, it’s that we don’t have to imagine what can happen when people unite to fight hunger.
