ALLENTOWN, Pa. – More people are seeking assistance from a Lehigh County food bank.<\/p>\n
Allentown Ecumenical Food Bank says it’s seeing an increased demand from people who’ve lost or seen cuts to their SNAP benefits.<\/p>\n
Community leaders gathered at the food bank today and say this is because of the One Big Beautiful bill.<\/p>\n
They say when SNAP funding changes this fall, states could scale back paying for it or withdraw from it.<\/p>\n
“Food is not a luxury. It’s a basic need and we have a collective responsibility to ensure our neighbors have enough to eat,” says Julie Bancroft, CEO, Feeding Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
The food bank says it receives food from Second Harvest each week, but Second Harvest hasn’t received the amount of federal food it has years ago.<\/p>\n
According to the food bank, it is spending between $10,000 to $15,000 a month on food to fill the gaps.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has defended its SNAP policies, saying new restrictions promote taxpayer stewardship, prevent fraud and strictly adhere to funding limitations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – More people are seeking assistance from a Lehigh County food bank. Allentown Ecumenical Food Bank…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,433],"class_list":["post-263122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-lehigh-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}