Bay Area food banks ask for help to keep feeding their communities

The Bay Area is suffering from widespread food insecurity, and food banks are scrambling to meet increasing needs while their budgets are strained.

Five food banks serving residents from Sonoma and Solano counties to Santa Clara County gathered on Tuesday to call for public support. Food banks in the north, east and South Bay are seeing long lines and dwindling funds. Together, the regional food banks distributed 320 million pounds of food last fiscal year, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley CEO Leslie Bacho said.

“We’re all facing similar challenges as food banks because we are all in very high cost of living areas,” Bacho told San José Spotlight. “We have a real affordability crisis where people working in low wage jobs aren’t making enough to be able to pay their rent and still afford food. So we see more and more working families, we see lots of seniors living on fixed incomes who are just struggling to make it day to day.”

For Second Harvest, which serves San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, the food bank is providing produce to nearly 500,000 people a month — the same as it was during the height of the pandemic. Prior to that, the food bank served 250,000 people every month through food distributions and grocery programs. It is facing a 20% budget shortfall and a 40% drop in funding since the pandemic, Bacho said.

For the fiscal year 2022-23, the nonprofit had an annual budget of more than $274 million, but its expenses were close to $280 million.

To make up for the deficit, Second Harvest has had to pause providing meats, and is giving out less dairy and eggs. In addition, it may look for ways to cut personnel costs, Bacho said.

“We’re just trying to manage our costs,” Bacho said. “It is really difficult because, again, we’re putting in the same amount of effort in the community (as during the pandemic).”

Regi Young, executive director of Alameda County Community Food Bank, said food is a policy decision. During the pandemic, food insecurity was at a low as the government injected funding into food banks and increased money available through food stamps.

“We are in the situation where all of the Bay Area food banks are here together, asking for support, asking for resources, because all of those gains that we made during the pandemic have gone away because the government has decided that those priorities are not the priorities today,” Young said.
Bacho is concerned funding may further dwindle as President-elect Donald Trump takes office next month. During his previous term, Bacho’s organization saw how immigrant communities were afraid to receive government resources. Second Harvest workers had to reassure them it was safe to come to their food distributions.

“We’re concerned right now because the farm bill is up for reauthorization, and that’s how programs like CalFresh, or food stamps, is funded,” Bacho said. “That’s how a lot of the commodities, the food that we receive from the government, is funded. We’re concerned about … what sort of impact (the new administration) might have on those resources.”

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X, formerly known as Twitter.