Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes is seeing demand for its services return to normal after the federal government reopened last week, allowing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to resume.
Greta Faworski is the associate director of Loaves and Fishes. She said during the SNAP pause, the food bank saw an average of well over 1,000 people a day. It usually sees 800 to 850.
She added that this increased demand came with increased costs.
“Our average food budget for a month for all of our programs is $150,000. We spent $150,000 in one week just for our grocery pantry program.”
But Faworski said monetary and food donations also increased, along with those willing to volunteer their time.
"Those extra donations were really important. We had a lot of people reaching out to volunteer. We had a lot of food drives," Faworksi said.
"We had the whole community reaching out to try to help."
She added that the spike in demand demonstrated just how important SNAP is to Kalamazoo residents.
“SNAP is a very important part of keeping everybody in food security and the food banks alone cannot keep up with that. We can do it for a short period of time if we had to, like we did. But we are not designed, any food bank is not designed to replace SNAP.”
Faworski said that despite SNAP benefits going out, hunger is still an issue.
"Hunger still is in our community. There's still food insecurity every day. As I said, our normal everyday average is about 800 to 850 people and that's not going away," Faworski said.
"A lot of people who are working and are just one issue away from financial crisis and so we really want people to understand that this is not a one-and-done situation."
Eleanor’s Pantry in Paw Paw also saw increased traffic during the shutdown.
Executive Director Sue Miller said Monday that despite SNAP resuming, they’re still seeing the same demand. But she added that she expects things to return to normal by the end of the week.
Michael Symonds reports for WMUK through the Report for America national service program.
