The line stretched so long that it doubled back, and volunteers needed an extra hour to load every car. They also needed to dip into the freezer to hand out food meant for next week\u2019s distribution.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo many people are food challenged in our community,\u201d said Michael Miller, treasurer for Hunger at Home, which sets up their operations in the parking lot every Monday morning. \u201cNow, without the food stamps, people are desperate. We\u2019re just trying to give a little hope here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Demand for free food is soaring at Bay Area food pantries as recipients of the embattled federal food stamps program are seeing their accounts frozen and worry they won\u2019t be able to feed their families.<\/p>\n
Charity programs that distribute food, meanwhile, are scrambling for more donations to restock their shelves.<\/p>\n
Ever since Congress shut down the federal government over a spending bill stalemate, payments from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) used mostly at grocery stores have been in jeopardy. Tens of millions of recipients received notice last Thursday that their accounts weren\u2019t being replenished in November.<\/p>\n
On Monday, after a federal judge ruled that the Trump Administration must fund the food program, President Trump said he would use SNAP\u2019s nearly $5 billion emergency fund for the month of November, but because there\u2019s still a $4 billion shortfall to fully fund the program, benefits might be cut in half. How long it will take to release those funds remains uncertain.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m gonna starve,\u201d said Nick Gamez, lining up at West Valley Community Services food pantry in Cupertino Monday. \u201cI got this food bank, thank God, but I can barely get around. I ended up losing my job and being homeless. I lost where I lived for 30 years because I couldn\u2019t pay the rent. So now I live in my son\u2019s car.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Alameda County Community Food Bank, which distributes food to more than 350 food pantries in schools, senior centers, child care facilities and other agencies across the county, is seeing an \u201cextraordinary increase\u201d in demand for food, said spokesman Michael Altfest.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lines are growing,\u201d Altfest said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been hearing from a lot of agencies that are running out of food very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Calls to the Alameda County food bank\u2019s emergency helpline for people urgently seeking food have been doubling every week for several weeks, the surge driven mainly by people dependent on the SNAP program and anticipating the disruption, Altfest said.<\/p>\n
The escalating demand for food resembles the early days of COVID, Altfest said, when shutdowns threw large numbers of people out of work.<\/p>\n
But now, there\u2019s a major difference.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring COVID, hunger and poverty went down, and that was because of interventions by the federal government,\u201d Altfest said. \u201cThis time it\u2019s the federal government that\u2019s causing what\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, thousands of Bay Area residents are expected to be pushed out of the SNAP program in the coming weeks as county and state officials determine who no longer qualifies under President Donald Trump\u2019s spending bill, which restricted eligibility.<\/p>\n
The Alameda County food bank has also been providing weekly food deliveries for 200 to 300 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who work at Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, and more than 1,500 workers from another federal agency, who haven\u2019t been paid because of the federal government shutdown, Altfest added.<\/p>\n
Food pantries under the umbrella of the Food Bank of Contra Costa & Solano \u201care seeing more people standing in line,\u201d said the nonprofit\u2019s advocacy and policy manager, Hailey Solares, while the phone has been \u201cringing off the hook\u201d with people seeking food, spokesman Jeremy Crittenden added.<\/p>\n
The current government shutdown is about to tie a record for duration. And because the last government shutdown didn\u2019t disrupt SNAP benefits in California, Crittenden said, \u201cwe\u2019re in uncharted territory.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the West Valley Community Services food pantry in Cupertino, Belkis Mir stood in line Monday with her 4-month-old, Subha, the youngest of her three children.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the kids, I\u2019m worried, because how can we survive with no food?\u201d she asked. Already, SNAP wasn\u2019t paying enough to cover the family\u2019s food bill, so the West Valley pantry was a big help. She has been receiving benefits since her husband lost his job as a retail store manager four months ago \u2014 around the same time their infant was born.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are losing jobs,\u201d she said. \u201cI know a lot of other friends that have been laid off. It\u2019s really hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
West Valley Community Service has seen demand roughly double since the government shut down in early October and word spread that SNAP benefits could be cut. Last Thursday, when SNAP notices went out warning that funding would stop in November, the number of people in line jumped from the normal 25 to 63, said Executive Director Sujatha Venkatraman .<\/p>\n
\u201cOur fear is that new people who have not used our services because they had SNAP and they were figuring it out with their income, would need us now,\u201d Venkatraman said. \u201cSo we are preparing for that, and we definitely need to make sure more food comes in. So we\u2019re asking for more food donation, more financial donations to run our market operation.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the San Jose Flea Market parking lot, Patricia Ribeiro volunteers every Monday morning with her daughter, who is raising four children without their father\u2019s help and is grateful to also receive a box of food each week. Her daughter, Gina, is using the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program for food, but worries even that could be cut.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to cry, but the kids were left with no money, no nothing,\u201d Patricia said. \u201cThroughout all the years, we\u2019ve never had to come to a place to ask anybody for help. If it wasn\u2019t for Hunger at Home, I don\u2019t know what I would do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the parking lot at the San Jose Flea Market on Monday morning where Hunger at Home feeds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38629,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[26588,13861,6100,26589,13,1877,88,90,89,732,13864,14609,435,26587],"class_list":["post-38628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-2018-2019-united-states-federal-government-shutdown","tag-economy-of-the-united-states","tag-food-bank","tag-humanitarian-aid","tag-politics","tag-poverty","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-social-issues","tag-society-of-the-united-states","tag-supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program","tag-united-states","tag-wic-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}