‘JUST SURVIVING’: The end of pandemic SNAP benefits has pushed Syracuse toward a hunger crisis

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n the first warm Friday morning in Syracuse, Donna Whitley’s Dodge Grand Caravan joined the line of cars idling outside the food pantry at University United Methodist Church.

The queue stretched away from the pantry, down University Avenue and around the corner onto Ashworth Place. When the doors opened around 10 a.m. and the carts rattled out, vehicles crept forward, one by one, rolling down their windows to chat with pantry volunteers.

Women with clipboards greeted them, asked how they were doing that morning, how many families they were picking up for. Just one, was it? Two? Six?

Until recently, Whitley, 61, would’ve come just for herself and her daughter, seeking a little extra help to keep her pantry full so she could stretch her wages from a local nursing home a bit farther.

That morning, though, she asked the volunteers for an additional box, one she would give to her 85-year-old mother.

Whitley said her mother was getting by much easier a few months ago, with her income bolstered by over $200 per month from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In March, those benefits from SNAP, which were raised three years earlier in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, fell to just $23 per month — the minimum for an individual recipient.

“You can’t survive on $23 a month, for a senior,” Whitley said. “You just can’t.”

Valerie Young, a friend of Whitley’s, sat in the passenger seat. Like Whitley’s mother, she’s had her benefits reduced. “There isn’t enough for anybody,” she said.

The Friday morning line at UUMC often runs long. The Interfaith Community Co-op — a collaborative of several nearby houses of worship — runs a large-scale food pantry out of the church. Its executive director, Galyn Murphy-Stanley, said it serves well over two hundred households per week even at the best of times.

And these are not the best of times. The lines are getting longer — not just here, but at pantries across Syracuse.

Several pantry directors said demand for emergency food assistance has spiked since March, when the pandemic boost to SNAP payments expired in New York. That decrease left over 66,000 Onondaga County residents with a fraction of their previous benefits.

Those cutbacks have had an immediate impact on the individuals who receive them, straining budgets and emptying pantries. But they’re only part of a wider crisis facing Syracuse’s food-insecure residents, compounded by inflation and the withdrawal of other pandemic-era safety nets.

As prices for basic necessities soar, residents and the pantries they rely on have even less money to afford them. And it’s pushing an emergency food system propped up by good faith and generosity closer to the edge.

Meghan Hendricks | Senior Staff Photographer

The Food Bank of Central New York has seen evidence of a sharp uptick in demand for some areas it serves.

Now, as federal lawmakers consider increased restrictions on SNAP amid the debt ceiling debate, individual pantries are weighing tough choices about how they can serve their need-stricken communities — and who they might have to turn away.

Leaders in the system responsible for feeding Syracuse’s most vulnerable populations worry the situation could get worse.

“Anybody standing in line at the food pantries, they’re saying the same thing: that we were functioning at a certain level of stability, and then one of the props got kicked out,” said BJ Norrix, lead pastor at Syracuse United Methodist Ministries. “People are scrambling.”

Surviving, but not getting by

The trip to UUMC on April 14 was part of Whitley’s daily routine. It begins at 9:30 p.m., when she wakes up for her night shift at the nursing home, and ends in midafternoon, after she runs errands that regularly include trips to local food pantries.

With inflation and the cutback to her mother’s benefits, Whitley said she’s had to make that routine a bit longer, heading to more pantries to keep her and her mother’s cabinets stocked.

“You don’t go to one now. You gotta go to a couple just to get enough,” Whitley said. “When I hit that bed, I’m sleeping ‘til 9:30. I get up and start all over again.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without her,” said Rosemary Allen, Whitley’s mother. She sat beside her daughter on the front porch of the house they share on Hawley Avenue, beside a colorful garden filled with stones and plastic flowers.

Allen rarely needed food from the pantry before, she said. Since the end of increased SNAP benefits, she’s come to rely on it to get through the month.

The $23 that Allen receives now doesn’t go far, Whitley said. It’s just enough to purchase one package from Food $en$e, a program run by the Food Bank of Central New York that sells boxes of pantry staples like meat, pasta and fresh produce for $20.50. The purchase leaves her with $2.50 to last the month.

“It really hurts,” Allen said of the end to her increased SNAP benefits.

Whitley nodded. She’s seen the colliding effects of inflation and SNAP cutbacks ripple through her neighborhood, including at the food pantry where she and Young volunteer. Lines there have grown as supplies have dwindled. She recalled a recent distribution day when a new group arrived after being sent over from another overwhelmed pantry.

The shift is also apparent in the lines of people who show up to the Interfaith Community Co-op at UUMC each Friday morning. Many are retirees living on a fixed income, or people with disabilities. Others work but need the additional support as prices for food and rent surge ever higher.

Meghan Hendricks | Senior Staff Photographer

Rosemary Allen (right) has started to rely heavily on food pantries after her SNAP benefits were slashed by almost 10 times their original amount. She’s had to rely heavily on her daughter Donna Whitley (left) to stock her fridge.

Some, like Melba Felix — who was in the car behind Whitley — need to feed their kids. Since the SNAP decrease, Felix said she receives $170 less to support her six children each month, and the pantry helps her keep up.

“It seems like I have to come pretty much every week now,” said Connie Askew, who sat on the church’s front steps that morning, waiting for the pantry to open. Like many retirees who live in nearby apartments, she walks there on distribution days.

Askew, like others, said she felt blindsided by the cuts. She had no idea they were coming.

“If they had gave me full warning, I would’ve known how to budget,” she said.

Senior citizens, who comprise a significant share of the co-op’s patrons, have particularly felt the pressure. Several said that they’re rationing meals to get through the month and choosing whether to spend their limited income on bills or food.

Leonard Shuler, a soft-spoken retiree, said his benefits have decreased by more than $80. John Delaney, a 64-year-old veteran who often rides his bike to the pantry, said his were reduced to the $23 minimum.

There was also Lisa Prince. For a while, she said, the increased SNAP benefits provided her with enough to get by. Now, with her benefits slashed to $23 and her rent costs rising, she’s rationing meals.

“I have to change the way I eat, what I eat,” Prince said.

Prince, who is from the Northside neighborhood of Syracuse, said she took the bus to UUMC that morning, and was sitting on the church’s steps in near 80-degree heat as she waited for it to come back. “Making bigger dinners, you can make them last two or three days, as long as you stretch them out,” she said.

The hardest part for many SNAP recipients is that, for a time, they knew stability, said Kristi Schoff, who runs the food pantry at Syracuse Northeast Community Center and receives SNAP benefits herself. Fewer people had to “scrimp and save” just to make it through the month, she said. Fewer parents had to worry where their child’s next meal would come from.

Now they feel like that short-lived support has been ripped out from under them, Schoff said, at a time when food is more expensive than ever.

“There are a lot of people that are not getting by,” Schoff said. “Just surviving, and not getting by.”

Empty shelves and growing need

Quincy Stockton runs Westside Food Center out of a side door at Brown Memorial United Methodist Church — a white brick building with a tidy lawn, situated in the heart of one of Syracuse’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

It’s a small distribution site, serving a hyperlocal clientele in a several-block radius around the church. But it’s also vital in a community where Stockton said the closest grocery store is over a mile away and 90% of the patrons come on foot.

And like other food pantries in Syracuse, the number of attendees rose there after the end of pandemic SNAP benefits — from 140 households in February to nearly 170 in March, Stockton said.

“It’s having a serious effect on our program,” Stockton said. “Our budget is depleted.” He gestured to the half-empty wire racks flanking his storage space. “Normally, every shelf in this room would be completely stocked.”

Meghan Hendricks | Senior Staff Photographer

The Vineyard Church has had to find more avenues for grant funding but the need for more help keeps increasing.

Across the city, pantry directors like Stockton are noticing the trends. People who were able to manage on the elevated SNAP benefits have started turning to their local pantries. Those who already attended began returning more frequently — perhaps more frequently than allowed — or ventured to find pantries farther afield, whose areas of service they might not reside in.

The system is creaking under that shift as desperation strains the loose, often honor-based limits that pantries may impose but prefer not to enforce.

Volunteers like Stockton, who prefer to take people at their word, are tightening up screening procedures meant to regulate how often people access pantries. They’re also trying to direct out-of-area visitors to resources closer to them — even if those are few and far between.

“Before I used to be lenient on that,” Stockton said. “Now I can’t be. I just don’t have the stock available.”

The network that supports food pantries in Syracuse and across the country is a complex balance of government programs, nonprofit grants and local philanthropy. Food, funds and logistical support filter down from the state and federal government, as well as national nonprofits, to reach regional agencies like the Food Bank of Central New York. The Food Bank, in turn, shares those resources with local pantries based on their need.

That system has succeeded in delivering tons upon tons of food to people every month, said Murphy-Stanley, the Interfaith Community Co-op director. But it’s also outdated, she said, mostly unchanged from its Great Depression-era roots. Moreover, it’s heavily reliant on the continued generosity of donors, volunteers and the community organizations that do the work of food distribution.

“This is what is enraging about this,” said Murphy-Stanley, who perched on a stool in UUMC’s basement kitchen after a distribution event. “It almost allows the government to close its eyes and walk away.”

Three hours earlier, about 275 boxes of food sat on long tables in the next room over, half-filled with shelf-stable goods that arrived earlier in the week. The rest — 3,000 pounds’ worth recovered from local grocery stores, Murphy-Stanley said — came that morning, ferried by a human chain down rickety wooden steps into the basement.

Fruits, vegetables, breads and pastries all made their way down, as well as the occasional cake, which volunteers would stash away for attendees with upcoming birthdays or anniversaries.

That delivery represented an increase of around 25% from what the co-op got by with when the elevated SNAP benefits were still in place, Murphy-Stanley said. Sometimes it’s still not enough.

“The first week (SNAP cuts) happened, we ran out of food,” Murphy-Stanley said. “250 boxes of food, which feeds 800 people — we ran out of that in 90 minutes.”

At the same time, the co-op has had to stretch its limited resources to meet the community’s needs. It has run out of grant funding, according to Murphy-Stanley, and until the next grant cycle begins later this summer the pantry will be more reliant on private donations.

Several other food pantry directors who spoke with The Daily Orange said they too had depleted their funding. Now they’re low on cash, caught between high food costs and rising demand, and turning to donors for support.

“We’re gonna have to either find more avenues for grant funding, or ask our people to be more generous,” said Chris Honess, lead pastor of Vineyard Church in Syracuse, which manages four pantries in the area. “It’s hard to say we need more, more, more. But the need is pretty great. And it’s not going away.”

Friar Joseph Krondon, director of the food pantry at Assumption Church, said he’s noted a similar trend, watching the number of attendees at his pantry jump from fewer than 400 households to over 530 between February and March. And at the Syracuse Northeast Community Center, the number of households accessing the pantry jumped from 97 to 119 in the same span, Schoff said.

The Food Bank of Central New York has seen anecdotal evidence of “a sharp uptick” in demand for some areas it serves, said Michael Watrous, the Food Bank’s agency relations manager. It’s too early to identify a clear region-wide trend, he said, but the Food Bank is monitoring its data carefully.

“Because typically when we see a need in one community, we’ll see it in five others in a few days, and then a lot more the following week,” Watrous said.

Pantry directors said they fear the trend will worsen as food becomes more expensive, as the high-need season of summer approaches and as more people turn to the emergency food system to stay above water.

At UUMC, though, the co-op’s volunteers soldier on, committed to serving their clientele through acts of kindness large and small.

Earlier on the distribution day that Murphy-Stanley spoke with The D.O., one attendee leaned across the passenger seat of her Toyota to get a volunteer’s attention. Her young daughter wanted to tell him something, she said.

The volunteer — Lanny Freshman, a former pediatrician who recognizes some of his old patients among the regulars — leaned close to the rear window. The child murmured in his ear.

“I’ll let them know,” Freshman said.

A minute later, another volunteer emerged with one of the leftover birthday cakes tucked in a brown paper bag.

The reserve cakes ran out soon after that. Just before noon, the food boxes would stop coming altogether. Then the announcement arrived: the co-op had nothing left to give.

The last few cars pulled away down University Avenue, empty-handed.

A system at a crossroads

At a virtual meeting of the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance, Murphy-Stanley and Beth DuBois, a pastoral associate at UUMC who helps run the pantry, tried to convey the urgency of their situation.

The duo ran through statistics. They spoke about the estimated 4.2 million people the elevated SNAP benefits kept out of poverty nationwide, as well as the challenges they’re now facing in Syracuse, like an unlivable minimum wage and the soaring costs of food.

After a brief period of added support, DuBois said, it feels like the government is once again leaving the task of feeding its most vulnerable citizens to volunteers and private donors.

“It unfortunately allows the government, in many ways, to rely on nonprofit and volunteer support to keep a dysfunctional food system running,” DuBois told the audience of local residents, activists and a few Syracuse University professors, among other attendees. “It’s a policy choice. It’s not accidental. It’s a choice.”

Meghan Hendricks | Senior Staff Photographer

As food becomes more expensive, pantry directors fear the hunger crisis will worsen in and around Syracuse.

This year, that choice — how the government should fund SNAP and nutrition programs like it — has come to the fore of debate in both Albany and Washington D.C.

The New York budget approved earlier this month largely maintained the state’s previous level of funding for the programs food banks rely on, said Becky Lare, director of government relations for the Food Bank of Central New York. The decision came as a relief after Gov. Kathy Hochul’s initial budget proposed slashing state funding to some key initiatives.

Still, with food costs rising, Lare said the current budget leaves food banks to do more with the same amount of state-level support.

“As our costs are increasing to procure food, if funding is at the same level, then that obviously has an impact on how much food we’re able to purchase,” Lare said.

At the federal level, Republican lawmakers bargaining over the debt ceiling have proposed tightening work requirements to access SNAP benefits as part of wider spending cuts. And the Farm Bill — the massive piece of legislation that established SNAP and underpins the entire U.S. food system — comes back up for debate this year, creating the potential for lawmakers to expand the safety net or reduce it further.

Whatever decision they reach, the outcome will likely resonate throughout the country, including in the Syracuse communities hard-hit by the recent cutbacks.

SNAP’s impact isn’t limited to those eligible to receive it, either. A decline in food aid that creates greater need across the board affects how the emergency food system can respond to all its clients, even those who don’t qualify. That includes Syracuse’s immigrant residents, who in many cases don’t qualify for SNAP due to citizenship requirements or face high barriers to accessing it.

As politics takes its course, the system is increasingly strained, Murphy-Stanley said. And the only reason it can continue to feed multitudes of people, even as it stares down greater demand and rising costs, is generosity.

That generosity comes not just from the volunteers and donors, but from recipients as well. Many, like Whitley, make food pantry trips for friends or neighbors. Some volunteer at the same organizations they rely on. They check in with those they know are struggling and offer to share what they have.

“I live in a community where — I live on Butternut Street — nobody has nothing,” said Young, the friend who rode shotgun with Whitley the morning she swung by UUMC. “So whatever you got, you share with your neighbors.”

Around noon on April 14, after Whitley and Young drove off and the co-op’s doors closed, a lone woman crossed the street. Another latecomer — Steve, a senior who said he’d recently lost his SNAP benefits due to a paperwork mishap and had made multiple trips downtown on foot to sort it out — saw her approach. He recognized her as a neighbor.

Steve, who was also worried his landlord might try to evict him in the coming weeks, told her they were closed. But he’d managed to snag some items for himself.

Without hesitation, he opened his bag, offering to share.

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