“The priority right now is food,” Matthew Asia, Broadbrook said.
Asia and his wife both work, but with five kids they struggle to feed their family and pay all of their bills. They rely on food stamps and the Five Corner Cupboard food pantry in East Windsor.
The pantry’s executive director says it’s helped 10 new clients every month for the past four years. Marie Groves says she expects that number to skyrocket if the government shutdown continues into February.
Foodshare, a food bank serving Hartford and Tolland counties, provided 14 million meals last year. Tuesday, volunteers packed boxes for the senior food program.
“If this shutdown continues I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to do that,” Jason Jakubowski, Foodshare’s executive director, said.
He believes that if the food stamp program known as SNAP runs out of money, people who can’t afford groceries will turn to food pantries and soup kitchens. There are 400,000 people in Connecticut on food stamps.
“It’s gonna affect everybody,” Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen Executive Director Priscilla Brayson said.
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Brayson shopped for fresh fruits and vegetables for her Enfield soup kitchen at Foodshare on Tuesday.
“Without Foodshare we wouldn’t be able to exist and feed the people that we do,” she said.
Brayson estimated they help 100 people a day right now. However, with government employees not getting paid and those already on assistance facing cuts she’s expecting lines to start forming.
“I will be seeing a lot more people coming into the soup kitchen,” said Brayson.
The USDA has set aside $3 billion for the SNAP program for the month of February, but the program costs $5 billion a month to run.
Meanwhile, Foodshare says the federal government has promised to keep funding their share of the food bank’s inventory through the month of March.
Cuts could also come to the federal program that helps stock Foodshare’s shelves. That means, less food to distribute to their 300 pantry partners at the same time more people are in need of a helping hand.
“We are absolutely in unchartered territory and I think what’s making most of us anxious is we don’t know how long it’s going to continue,” said Jakubowski.
“We’re just surviving. We’re here day by day, you don’t know what’s going to happen next month. You just never know what could happen to us,” Asia added.
