YAKIMA, Wash. — As the federal government reopened, the demand at local food banks has gone down, but they are still feeling the effect of the need for food.
“If you have a situation where the government has been shut down for over a month and folks that are relying on certain supports don’t get those supports, there’s a trickle effect of how long that’s going to take and how that’s going to impact everything,” said Kate Urwin, the Director of Development at the United Way of Central Washington.
When Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Benefits (SNAP) were up in the air during the recent government shutdown, food banks were flooded with clients trying to feed themselves and their families with already strained family budgets.
“Think our food banks are not only struggling with the ability to try and sustain a system they were never meant to sustain,” Urwin said. “It’s like putting out a house fire with a garden hose.”
Getting enough food in the bank is one thing, but staffing the organizations that are usually not for profit and heavily reliant on volunteers in another thing.
“When you take away and you yank away that consistency, then suddenly you see an influx of utilization, and for a lot of our food banks that’s not just food related, that’s also the amount of hours they’re spending in taking that food, processing that food, getting it ready to go out,” Urwin said. “The volunteer hours it takes with the extra folks that are showing up that they weren’t maybe anticipating or weren’t anticipating but not in such high numbers.”
Now, the shutdown is over, but Urwin doesn’t think that those families and individuals that use SNAP benefits will get back to the way they were in September before the holidays.
“It is going to make it harder. Is there ever a good time to have a government shutdown? No. But probably this would have been one of the worst ones I can think of as far as timing goes. It’s just that the effects of that will ripple into the holiday season and it will simply make it harder for families in our valley to have a happy holiday,” Urwin said.
Dining and Cooking