Media Coverage

CLEVELAND — The situation has reached critical levels as inflation continues to strain household budgets across the state.

While pandemic-era food lines made headlines, current demand has quietly surpassed those emergency levels.

"From July through December of 2024, we served more food pantry visitors in that six-month span than we had in any six-month span in our 35-year history," reports Joree Novotny, Executive Director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, a network of 12 Feeding America food banks and 3,600 hunger relief agencies.

Food prices in the U.S. remain stubbornly high, having grown by more than 20% since the start of the pandemic, outpacing inflation.

Now hunger relief organizations warn a potential shutdown of the federal government could mean disruptions and delays for Ohioans who rely on federal aid through SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Food Stamps.

Joree Novotny is executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks.

The executive budget proposal would reduce funding for foodbanks by $7.5 million per fiscal year even as foodbanks are experiencing “record high utilization,” Ohio Association of Foodbanks (OAF) Executive Director Joree Novotny told the House Finance Committee this week.

“We respectfully request the restoration of this $7.5 million per year cut and additional funding of $4.93 million per year, for a total investment of $36.98 million per fiscal year in the 2026-27 state biennial budget. Foodbanks saw an average year-over-year increase in utilization of about 10 percent from 2020 to 2023, and then this rate accelerated significantly in the 2024-25 biennium,” Novotny said.

“From July to December 2024, we provided take-home groceries to more than 8.2 million food pantry visitors in six months, or nearly 1.4 million visitors per month,” she continued. “That represents a 64.71 percent increase in households with children compared to 2019, and a 70.32 percent increase in the number of seniors compared to 2019. In fact, the number of seniors seeking help from our food pantry network has gone up by 97 percent since 2016, as older adults continue to enter retirement without adequate savings and resources to afford rising housing and health care costs.”

Novotny said OAF’s budget request would allow the organization to provide at least 58 million pounds of food to all of Ohio’s 88 counties.

Stark and Summit County nonprofits that help people facing food insecurity and hunger fear cuts in federal funding could leave their programs starved for resources.

"We are preparing ourselves," Stark County Hunger Task Force Executive Director Stephanie Sweany said. "It's hard to navigate and know what is coming around the corner. We are trying to stay on top of it."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced over $1 billion in budget cuts to food banks and schools nationwide, inhibiting their ability to purchase fresh food directly from local farms and food producers. The cuts are part of the Trump administration's aim to reduce federal spending and government waste.

USDA: The USDA this month notified states that it did not plan to carry out a second round of funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, but funds for existing contracts nationwide aren’t frozen. The Ohio Association of Foodbanks said it worked with roughly 170 food aggregators during the program’s three-year span. This produced 4.6 million pounds of food statewide, and food bank network leaders aren’t sure if they can replace that.