Month: October 2025

Building Safe Spaces to Fight Hunger

This upcoming November, recipients of SNAP will not get their benefits because of the ongoing government shutdown. A growing number of Americans are missing their car payments, a key indicator that all is not well with the economy. The threat of the military being deployed to American cities continues to loom.

In addition, growing fears of ICE using increasingly aggressive and brutal tactics makes public spaces less safe.

Despite the obvious and inevitable incoming growth in hunger rates, these conditions create a very real conundrum of rising food insecurity but fewer safe opportunities for people to access food.

Whether or not any of these factors make you personally feel unsafe, it’s important to recognize that they contribute to hunger rates. As anti-hunger advocates, we have an obligation to address it.

It’s easy to feel helpless in this situation, but there are still some very real steps that we can take to combat hunger with dignity and compassion.

Here’s how food pantries can help:

  • Minimize the amount of information you ask of shoppers. Visiting a food pantry is already a vulnerable experience, and many people associate pantries with the government, whether it’s true or not. Asking for no more information than you absolutely need can help shoppers feel more comfortable- and it should be a given that you never share any client information without a warrant.
  • Increase your distribution hours to decrease wait times. Building a system that allows shoppers to get in and out quickly helps people feel more in control of their environment and makes it easier to visit despite busy schedules. Allowing easy flow also makes it more difficult for any enforcement agencies to target your clientele.
  • Mobile markets. While difficult to organize and implement, thoughtful identification of locations for distribution empowers individuals to access food while feeling relatively anonymous. While these events still need to advertise their location, variable times and locations both improve accessibility and help people feel safer from surveillance.
  • Drive-through distribution. During the heart of the pandemic, we learned these are an effective way to get food to lots of people fast. While they don’t regularly allow freedom of choice, enabling people to remain in their cars may be a strong incentive for those who may not feel safe in public spaces.

One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned about fighting hunger is that addressing the biggest, most difficult barriers impacts the greatest amount of people. None of these suggestions are easy or simple to implement. But while they specifically intend to help people feel safe accessing food, they also increase access for individuals with disabilities, a lack of transportation, or schedules that don’t allow for regular pantry visits. Building safe spaces benefits everyone.

By putting in the extra effort to help our most vulnerable community members, we can have the biggest impact on hunger rates, and uplifting the dignity of everyone we serve.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Don’t Rebuild: Let’s Reimagine Fighting Hunger

Right now, my social media feed is nearly exclusively discussions on the reductions being made to anti-hunger resources. With cuts to Farm to School, SNAP, LFPA, TEFAP and more, the industry is shocked, panicked, and legitimately frightened about the future.

For impacts as tangible as cuts to the food supply, it’s incredibly hard not to focus on what we’re losing. Anyone who works in the food justice field knows that we simply can’t support the growing numbers of people facing food insecurity. Food banks and pantries just can’t meet the need as resources and food supplies are decimated.

While it remains essential that we strategize based on our remaining resources, I have been reflecting on how these cuts mean we’re no longer tied to these antihunger programs.

Their effectiveness has been deliberately whittled away, and they’re not doing what we need them to do.

This offers us a moment to fantasize about how we move forward. We have always known that our anti-hunger systems were inadequate, politically motivated, and rarely effective at addressing the root causes of poverty.

Rather than recreating what we had, we face an opportunity to imagine new possibilities.  

Untether yourself for a moment from the constraints of the current political environment, and brainstorm what we can change, rather than what we keep the same, to fight hunger.

My fantasy for achieving a hunger-free future:

What if, instead of restoring all the cut funding relating to food insecurity, we implemented universal healthcare? The average American in 2023 spent over $14,000 on healthcare (although the average in this case is somewhat misleading- some people spent astronomical amounts while others didn’t survive because they had nothing to spend.) In contrast, in 2023 Americans spent on average a little less than $10,000 on food.

Increasing access to healthcare (and hopefully its effectiveness too) and saving Americans this cost would more than cover the cost of food. While this wouldn’t address all the gaps in food access we currently have, it would make a significant impact alongside the added benefit of fostering a healthier population.

What would happen if instead of instead of maintaining WIC, we aggressively implemented programs ensuring that all women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC individuals earned equal wages to white men and had mandated paid sick and maternity leave? Bonus points if we throw in universal free childcare, which has wide-reaching social and economic ramifications.

There’s ample evidence that rectifying the gender pay gap effectively fights poverty, stimulates the economy, and improves retention rates for businesses.

What if we reallocated ALL of the funding our nation is currently putting toward militarizing the police, and established accessible housing for every single American? The U.S. Congress has allocated a little less than $20 billion to fund ICE this year, while in contrast, estimates to end houselessness range from $10-30 billion.

Are these realistic or simple tradeoffs? Absolutely not. Policy is never simple, and we live in difficult times. Making these changes won’t solve anything overnight- we will still need programs actively offering food to people facing insecurity.

But despite this, right now is exactly when anti-hunger and food justice advocates should brainstorm new ways to fight hunger, without restraint. Most advocates will agree that the tools we’ve been using are ineffective and clunky. If they’re being actively dismantled and we’re starting from scratch, we shouldn’t build systems that recreate the inadequacies of the past. We should build new tools that move us towards an anti-poverty future and not just a less food insecure one.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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