On a sweltering Thursday in July at the So What Else food pantry in North Bethesda, Chris Yonushonis is directing staff and volunteers as they unload pallets loaded with packs of SmartWater bottles in preparation for the pantry’s weekly outdoor distribution of food and necessities to an estimated 1,000 families.
On Saturdays, the line of cars for the distribution at the nonprofit’s Wyaconda Road pantry usually snakes around the block and throughout the surrounding neighborhoods, said Yonushonis, the Rockville nonprofit’s Montgomery County deputy director of hunger relief. The nonprofit runs an indoor food pantry and thrift store, as well as working with outside organizations to help them run food distribution events throughout the county.
“People are desperate,” Yonushonis said. “The line starts at 4 a.m. And we have to start serving before 5:30, or else the neighborhood is shut down. We’ve had people steal food. Now we work with those people directly and they understand they can get free food, but it shows how bad things are.”
Yonushonis and leaders at other area food hubs are trying to figure out ways to continue to meet the needs of a growing population of food-insecure residents while dealing with less funding than they had hoped for coming from the county this fiscal year–as well as the end of pandemic-era federal funding. He said the organization recently surveyed its food pantry patrons and found that 20% of visitors were new, which is “terrifying.”
“People are struggling and there’s a big gap in our county,” Jackie DeCarlo, the chief executive of Manna Food Center in Silver Spring, told MoCo360. “I think all agencies that are involved in this work for the past two years or so have seen an unexpected level of requests for services. And a lot of that started off with the disappearance of the pandemic-era emergency support, and [the need] has just been persistent.”
According to Manna Food Center’s 2023 annual report, the organization served more than 50,000 people and distributed 4.6 million pounds of food last year. A little under $4 million of the nonprofit’s funding came from government contracts and grants, according to the report. DeCarlo said the organization also relies heavily on funding from outside foundations.
During this year’s negotiations over the proposed fiscal year 2025 county operating budget, the County Council cut County Executive Marc Elrich’s (D) proposed $7 million in spending for the county Office of Food Systems Resilience to $3.5 million. The office distributes funding and serves as a liaison between government and community food systems partners such as nonprofits, farmers and businesses, according to county officials.
Though the office—created in 2023 to address food insecurity gaps following the COVID-19 pandemic—had a $1.1 million budget in fiscal 2024, Elrich had based his fiscal 2025 proposal on the anticipated need for more funding for local organizations addressing food insecurity, according to Heather Bruskin, director of the Office of Food Systems Resilience.
In October 2022, the county council approved an additional $8.1 million for the county’s Food Staples Program, which provides food to individuals and families in need, to prevent it from running out of money, and added $6.4 million for initiatives to alleviate food insecurity in the fiscal year 2024 budget. These funding initiatives were not renewed.
“Resources that we were depending on to provide expanded food assistance support to our community during the pandemic were largely federally funded,” Bruskin said. “Now we are in a position where so many of these resources, both that local governments were relying on to support their programs, as well as those that residents were receiving directly from federal sources, have gone away and are likely not to be renewed.”
Bruskin said that during the pandemic, there was about a 50% increase in food insecurity in the county population. That was coupled by an estimated 50% increase in the number of organizations that were providing food assistance in the county.
“I think that really shifted the landscape in terms of the number and type of organizations that were doing this work. And there is no direct measurement of food insecurity at the county level–that this data that we have is typically driven by what the demand for services is looking like,” Bruskin said.
Earl Stoddard, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer, said the end of a federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit supplement in March 2023 also has resulted in more residents needing help to feed their families.
“We’re talking about doing more with less money,” Stoddard said. “It was a perfect example of a program that could have done a lot more with limited dollars and opened up a pool of federal dollars that we know these residents are eligible for.”
No plans for more county funding
When asked by MoCo360 at a recent press briefing about the possibility of providing more funding to the Office of Food Systems Resilience, County Council President Andrew Friedson (D-District 1) said there were no immediate plans to do so. In May, the council adopted a $7.1 billion county operating budget for the fiscal year that began July 1.
“I think that the budget that was approved prioritized education. There were significant amounts of funding that were added to the public schools budget that required decisions, tough decisions in other areas of the budget and ultimately, the consensus landed where it did,” Friedson said. “We will see as needs arise and address those challenges as they come.”
Elrich criticized this approach when asked about the decision at a recent press briefing.
“We’re kind of in the same situation we were in last year [with food resiliency funding]. The council cut the funding in half and said come back later if you need it,” Elrich said. “And that process can be very disruptive because not every group that we fund starts running out of money at the exact same time.”
Elrich and councilmembers butted heads throughout the budget process during the spring, with councilmembers saying Elrich put them in a difficult position to adequately fund Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) without raising taxes, while Elrich argued his budget proposal would have worked. The council ultimately ended up reconfiguring the budget to provide greater funding for MCPS while making cuts in other areas, including the Office of Food Systems Resilience, to avoid raising property taxes.
“We will no doubt be back to the council and ask for the money as we start to run out again,” Elrich said. “It is our policy that people do not go hungry.”
DeCarlo said the council’s decision was “frustrating” for Manna, though she praised its support for programs including the county’s Plan to End Childhood Hunger. She said Manna will likely request special appropriations from the council, which would have to come from the county’s reserves.
“We are disappointed by the lack of transparency in that decision-making process because all the public indicators were that there was support for [the funding for the Office of Food Systems Resiliency],” DeCarlo said. “To have that change was really disappointing … it makes it difficult for us to plan because we don’t know what will happen [with appropriations].”
Allie Bonney, director of development for So What Else, says the organization hasn’t been successful in receiving special appropriations from the county in the past, so it has tried to be creative and look for a variety of funding streams.
“We’re redirecting and thinking outside the box or thinking about different avenues for funding as opposed to just straight-up county funding,” Bonney said.
So What Else held a summer soiree fundraiser in June, and other organizations have taken a similar approach. Nourishing Bethesda, a food drive initiative run by St. John’s Norwood Episcopal Church, is hosting a dinner fundraiser at Bacchus of Lebanon in downtown Bethesda on July 30. Kids In Need Distributors, which partners with local schools to provide take-home food for students facing insecurity, and Manna Food Center are holding a joint crab feast fundraiser on Sept. 28.
Yonushonis said So What Else sometimes struggles to qualify for certain grant funding because the nonprofit does not require people who comes to its pantry to fill out paperwork to prove their food insecurity. The nonprofit believes it’s important to be a resource for the community that is easily accessible, he said.
While the organization gathers some food it distributes from recovery partnerships with grocery chains and restaurants that contribute unsold products, the real struggle is operation expenses, Yonushonis said.
“The biggest single struggle for an organization like ours is there’s no grant money for operational expenses,” Yonushonis said. “We’ve gotten grants for structural improvements and refrigeration, which is awesome, but we struggle with operational expenses. I had to rent out a generator when ours went down.”
So What Else also relies heavily on dedicated regular volunteers, and Yonushonis said the physical labor involved in recovering and distributing food can be demanding and result in burnout for volunteers and staff. He said funding to hire additional staff would be a gamechanger for the organization and enable it to help more community members in need.
DeCarlo said Manna Food Center also relies on volunteers to operate and serve as many residents as possible. “We always need volunteers who are willing to be in the parking lot of Gaithersburg Middle School on a 90-degree day and help us share food,” she said.
DeCarlo said her goal is to demonstrate to county officials that government funding has an impact on Manna Food Center’s work.
“We need to make sure that this strategy is working and we’re very ready to collect the data and make the analysis to help the council make its decision and we hope they make the decision in an open way,” she said.
Yonushonis said he wishes Elrich and the council would see the impact that local food pantries have on solving other issues the county is facing.
“We get phone calls from people saying, ‘I’m shoplifting to feed my family, I want to stop,’ and we’re feeding them. So I wish [county officials] would see we’re contributing to that lower crime rate,” Yonushonis said. “We’re feeding students who are now doing better in school because they’re not hungry. … We’re keeping workers in the county because we’re supplementing them living in an extremely expensive area of the country. We’re providing a benefit beyond food, but I don’t think they see it that way.”