Williamston Food Bank director Jill Cutshaw has been seeing increased need for help in her community.
“We had been averaging about 63-64 families,” Cutshaw said. “And then two months ago, we hit 71. In May, we hit 79. Nobody’s immune to these problems right now, not anybody at all.”
At the same time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has implemented a $4.3 million budget cut to their Emergency Food Assistance Program. Phil Knight, the executive director of the Food Bank Council of Michigan told Gleaners that this has resulted in an estimated loss of 150,000 meals for the Greater Lansing Food Bank.
The Greater Lansing Food Bank provides food at a decreased cost to 140 food pantries and distribution centers across seven Michigan counties. One of these pantries is the Williamston Food Bank.
“If you look at the big picture, you’ve got USDA and Feeding America on the top level, and then you have Greater Lansing Food Bank, and then out to us,” Cutshaw said. “We order from them once a month, and sometimes we can get a lot, and sometimes there’s very little that’s available.”
Cutshaw said that it is thanks to the community that the Williamston Food Bank is able to consistently provide residents with adequate help.
In addition to the food they purchase from the Greater Lansing Food Bank, it benefits from food drives by local police, schools, the post office, large financial donations from the community including businesses and individuals, weekly donations from their local D&W grocery store, slightly outdated food from Meijer and donations from World Market.
“It’s all about telling people what you do, and you would be amazed,” Cutshaw said.
Cutshaw said that receiving this level of donation depends heavily on interacting with the community.
“You have to be outgoing, and you have to make sure people know what it is that you need,” Cutshaw said. “And when people help you, it’s so important to show them or tell them how much you appreciate it.”
This community involvement also allows Cutshaw to make sure that the food bank is evolving with the needs of community residents.
“One of my jobs is I meet with each of the families,” Cutshaw said. “I like to ask them, ‘What are you still going to the store to buy after you visit us?’”
Over the years, Cutshaw has provided a wide variety of items to meet the needs of community members, although providing extras has become more difficult as prices increase and funds become less abundant.
“One Christmas, when we were wealthier, we went out, bought everybody a crock pot, 80 crock pots,” Cutshaw said. “This year we gave them storage containers.”
Although the Williamston Food Bank is currently stable, Cutshaw said has begun planning for an uncertain future.
“We are looking at possibly having to fundraise,” Cutshaw said. “Which we’ve never done, and really we haven’t had to fundraise because of these other groups and the schools helping us.”
The Williamston Food Bank isn’t the only pantry that is apprehensive, despite their current stability. Stockbridge Community Outreach is another food pantry that is supplied by the Greater Lansing Food Bank.
Outreach director Gwen Reid said that against all odds, Stockbridge Community Outreach continues to prosper thanks to Greater Lansing Food Bank, which Reid was told has enough funding for the next three years.
In addition to being well supplied, Stockbridge Community Outreach has seen its number of monthly shoppers decrease.
“We used to maybe have around 70 a month shop our pantry,” Reid said. “And lately, one month it was like 58. I don’t know why we have seen our numbers decrease. I know that they should be increasing.”
Reid said Stockbridge Community Outreach relies heavily on donations from within the community and receives few grants.
“We get a really big grant from Chelsea Hospital that pretty much makes this whole program run so that all your donations fully go to clients, shoppers and people in need,” Reid said.
This other assistance can include anything from helping with bills to providing residents with gas cards so they can make it to doctor’s appointments.
“If your car breaks down, or you miss a day of work, there’s not room for error,” Reid said. “And then that snowball happens. When people are struggling, they need help with everything all at once and it’s hard to dig out, so we try to help a little.”
Possible SNAP reduction to impact families and food programs
In addition to the USDA budget cut, a federal budget proposal includes a $300 billion cut to the SNAP food assistance program.
The Michigan State Budget Office released a memo reporting that this could have a large impact on the 15% of Michigan residents receiving SNAP benefits and increase the demand put on food banks.
“That makes us feel like we need to provide more,” Cutshaw said. “Which, if you were to come in here on the Saturday that we’re open, you would see that people get a lot of food.”
This reduction of SNAP would largely affect children and the elderly. The SBO reports that 59% of households receiving SNAP benefits include children and 39% of households receiving SNAP benefits include the elderly or disabled.
The cuts could also affect programs created to help SNAP recipients get more bang for their buck.
Fair Food Network’s Double Up Food Bucks is a program that was created to help SNAP recipients in Michigan purchase more fresh produce. It is estimated by Fair Food Network that 188,000 Michigan households used the program in 2024.
Fair Food Network director of policy Alex Canepa said in an email that although the program funding Double Up Food Bucks is not being directly targeted, there is a chance that the program could be affected indirectly because of financial pressures on the government.
“This means that the states will have to either raise taxes or cut spending in other areas (fixing roads, paying teachers, or funding programs like Double Up),” Canepa said. “Any policy change that creates a squeeze of that magnitude on state budgets is going to potentially harm a lot of good programs funded by state legislatures.”