Audrey Bridge has been working at food shelves in Vermont for over 15 years and has never seen anything like what she’s experienced this month at the Rutland Community Cupboard.
“It’s been so overwhelming,” Bridge said in an interview Thursday. “We’re just trying to keep enough food on the shelf for the clients. We’re seeing them lining up outside two hours before we open sometimes — even in the rain.”
Bridge, the Rutland organization’s executive director, said the food shelf has seen a “mind-boggling” influx of demand in the past year, culminating in its busiest month in recent memory. According to Bridge, the Rutland Community Cupboard served nearly three times as many people this December as it did last December.
“Right now we’re really just dancing around as fast as we can to try to keep up with the demand,” said Bridge.
Rutland isn’t unique. All across the state, food shelves are reporting a staggering increase in demand in the past year. Staff attribute the uptick to the loss of pandemic-era benefits coupled with a series of crises that have affected communities around the state.
Residents were already struggling in the face of inflation, and many have been impacted by a mounting substance abuse crisis. Then, catastrophic flooding hit the state, first in in July, again in August, and then again earlier this month.
Andrew Courtney, director of Foodworks, a Brattleboro-based food shelf, said the number of people seeking food assistance “has definitely increased drastically this year.”
According to data shared by the organization, it has served nearly 2,000 new people — individuals with no prior record of having visited the food shelf — since December 2022.
Northeast Kingdom providers have experienced a similar upswell in demand. The Hardwick Area Food Pantry, which has locations in Hardwick, Craftsbury and Albany, has seen a nearly 30% increase in customers since March, according to data provided by the organization.
And in Montpelier, the food shelf run by the nonprofit Just Basics, which was displaced and changed locations after the July floods, has served twice as many people this December as it did in December of 2021.
Representatives from these organizations said that the increase in demand could mainly be traced back to this past spring, when extra pandemic-era food benefits ended for thousands of Vermonters.
Beginning in March 2020, those benefits provided over 40,000 Vermont families with roughly $6 million a month in total additional funding through 3SquaresVT, the Vermont food benefits program funded through the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), according to data provided by the Vermont Foodbank.
“The pandemic created a higher need, and that need was met with an influx in federal food and resources from philanthropy to purchase food for distribution,” Carrie Stahler, the Vermont Foodbank’s manager of government and public affairs, said in an email to VTDigger. “But it takes a long time for people to financially recover from a disaster.”
In the years prior to the pandemic, the Vermont Foodbank, a nonprofit that distributes food to food shelves and meal sites across the state, distributed about 600,000 pounds of food per month on average, an amount that rose to just over 1 million pounds at the end of 2021 during the pandemic, according to data provided by the organization.
That number reached a peak of 1.42 million pounds in August following the July floods. In October, the most recent month for which there is available data, the Foodbank distributed 1.34 million pounds of food, still a substantial increase from pre-pandemic and pandemic-era norms.
For Andrew Courtney of Foodworks in Brattleboro, increased expenses due to inflation without sufficient pay remain the biggest obstacle facing Vermonters.
“Since inflation really peaked, there are so many people in our community that are living paycheck to paycheck and any unexpected expenses that pop up really threaten food security for a whole lot of people,” said Courtney.
“It’s expensive to be alive right now,” said Courtney. “I think that’s the main story.”
Disclosure: VTDigger is currently running a member drive with the Vermont Foodbank as a partner. Staff coordinating the drive had no involvement in the assigning, production or editing of this story.
