Melville food bank: USDA's supplemental food program will stretch thin if shutdown lasts for weeks
Nearly 6,000 low-income Long Island seniors would lose their access to home-delivered food items if the federal government shutdown extends beyond three weeks, according to the head of one of the region’s largest food banks.
The USDA’s Commodity Supplemental Food Program provides Island Harvest in Melville with about 35 healthy food items that are packaged by volunteers and delivered each month to 5,777 seniors with incomes of less than $1,957 per month in Nassau and Suffolk, said Randi Shubin Dresner, president and chief executive of the food bank. Island Harvest is the lone operator of the program on Long Island.
With the lapse in federal funding, the Supplemental Food Program will run out of food in about three weeks, she said.
"This is a program that impacts some of the most vulnerable members of our society — senior citizens who have built up this community and who have an income of less than $1,957 a month to pay, literally, for all of their expenses," Shubin Dresner said. "And we've been supplementing close to 6,000 of these seniors with this food. And now they will have nothing."
Gregory May, director of government and community relations for Island Harvest, adds: "We can no longer submit orders for food as there's nobody at USDA to process the orders. So, the food that we have on hand, we can still deliver to the seniors. But we're not able to place any additional orders."
A USDA spokesperson said in a statement that “nutrition programs will operate based on state choice and the length of a shutdown.”
Contributing to the looming crisis, Shubin Dresner said, is that earlier this year the USDA slashed roughly $4 million in funding for Island Harvest amid major cutbacks to emergency food programs, limiting the non-profit’s reserves and creating a “cascading ripple effect.”
And the need is only expected to grow.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP], which provides food benefits to low-income families, is at risk of running out of funding if the shutdown continues into November.
Thousands of unpaid federal workers could potentially turn to Island Harvest and other local food banks for emergency assistance in the shutdown stretches on, she said.
“Right now, we are projected to distribute well over 21 million pounds this year,” Shubin Dresner said. “But when we budgeted that, we also budgeted where it was going to go and who it was going to support. … But now, there's going to be an increase in need in the community suddenly, and we're going to need to find additional food to make up for that delta; that difference, because it's so sudden and so unexpected.”
Island Harvest has launched a Hunger-Relief Action Fund to help mitigate the impacts of federal funding cuts.
Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.
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