News
Warehouse workers feel the strain as Congress debates food bank funding
By: Theo Peck-Suzuki | Report for America
Posted on:
LOGAN, Ohio (WOUB/Report for America) — If someone in southeast Ohio picks up food from a food pantry, it probably stopped at the Southeast Ohio Foodbank warehouse first.
The warehouse is the food bank’s central hub. Food from major state and federal programs passes through here, making it a vital point in the region’s broader food assistance network. Pantries rely on it to stock their shelves.
And yet, the past year has been challenging for the food bank warehouse after a 13% federal cut to emergency food packaging and distribution in fiscal year 2024. For almost a year, there’s been less money for facilities like this one, and the food bank’s employees are bearing the brunt.
“You know, we’re kind of hitting a wall. A person can only work so hard until they break,” said Southeast Ohio Foodbank Coordinator Ben Isham.
It’s the workers at the warehouse who absorb the impact of those cuts. The funding loss has also forced the food bank to recalibrate its distribution strategy: fewer big direct distributions at sites like county fairgrounds, more small distributions that rely on AmeriCorps volunteers. Isham said the food bank should actually be increasing its staff, but it can’t.
“It almost feels like we’ll always be understaffed, because — we don’t have the funding that we really need to serve the 10 counties (in our service area) like we should be,” Isham said. “We do the best with what we have.”
With Congress still gridlocked on its upcoming appropriations bill, the future of funding for food packaging and distribution remains unclear. According to Hocking Athens Perry Community Action Development Director Eva Bloom, the version in the House of Representatives would maintain the 13% cut. Bloom expressed concern about the additional pressure this would put on private donors, who she said are covering the cost.
“So I’m asking folks who are already being impacted by higher inflation, who are already making less than the state average, to support our food banks and to make up the difference that the government is not providing for us,” Bloom said.
The packaging and distribution cut isn’t the only thing in the House version of the appropriation bill that Bloom is concerned about. The House bill also makes cuts to the Commodity Supplemental Nutrition Program, which the Southeast Ohio Foodbank also participates in.
“CSFP provides groceries, essentially a food box, for seniors,” Bloom explained.
“We do need a Southeast Ohio Foodbank staff member to manage those sites (that are collecting the boxes), make sure that they’re in compliance for food safety, that they are doing what they need to do in terms of collecting the appropriate signatures so that we can stay in compliance with our federal regulations, and then to manage those applications as they come in,” Bloom said.
Conversely, Bloom said, more robust funding would give the food bank the ability to respond on a monthly or even weekly basis to shifting needs throughout its 10-county area.
WOUB reached out to members of Congress for their position on funding for CSFP and packaging and distribution, but did not hear back by the time of publication.