SPRINGFIELD — Federal cuts are impacting how many families a local food bank can feed.
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News Center 7′s Malik Patterson spoke with Second Harvest Food Bank’s Operations Director Sarah Roberts to learn just how much these cuts could be felt.
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Organizers at Second Harvest say over a half million dollars are being cut from their budget.
“The immediate impact to us is that we will have less food to hand out to the neighbors in need,” Roberts said.
Second Harvest serves Clark, Champagne and Logan Counties.
The federal government has recently cut two programs: the Emergency Food Assistance Program and the Association of Foodbanks Program.
Roberts says the food bank will not be receiving a shipment that was originally scheduled for delivery between May and August. The delivery was going to include essential food items like chicken, pork, milk, eggs, cereal, turkey breast and more, according to a post made on Second Harvest’s social media.
“It is approximately a little over $200,000 worth of food that will be cut during that time period,” Roberts said.
The Ohio Association of Foodbanks program ends in June and will impact local farmers across Ohio and neighboring states who grow the food.
“It will be $250,000 worth of food for the remainder of this year,” Roberts said.
Roberts says these programs helped keep people fed, and last year, the need was great.
“We served 56,518 unique individuals. We provided 3.9 million meals to our three counties,” Roberts said.
According to Roberts, many of the people in need of food are children.
“These cuts will begin at the end of May, when children are out of school, when we know the need is higher,” Roberts said.
While cuts are impacting food banks, some see them as a necessity.
“It’s sad to see cutting back more, I mean, a lot of people were struggling,” Ralph Carter from Springfield said.
Carter says he hates to see the cuts, but says he understands why the government is looking at agency spending.
“They’re trying to bring it down to [balance the budget] and everything like that, where it should be,” Carter said.
Roberts doesn’t know exactly how these cuts are going to affect the number of people Second Harvest feeds, but they are working to schedule meetings with local leaders to discuss options.
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