At Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, July marked the start of Fiscal Year 2025-2026. Last year, we achieved so many great accomplishments, serving neighbors across all seven counties with the support of our amazing community partners. While we celebrate a successful past year, we also were faced with some incredibly difficult decisions in preparation for the year ahead.
Like many nonprofits, we’ve faced significant financial pressures and uncertainties based on funding changes at the state and federal level. Because of this, we had to make the difficult decision to cut 20% of our services to protect the future of our mission. This isn’t an arbitrary number. This will affect real programs, real people, real schools, and real children.
For many children, school meals are their only reliable source of nutrition. But this year, even that lifeline is at risk. With changes to eligibility guidelines, many counties are scaling back access to free and reduced-price lunch programs, leaving families to navigate growing food costs on their own. At the same time, our community is being faced with significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP – essential lifelines for neighbors who do not have proper access to nutritious food and medical care on their own.
Over 1.4 million North Carolinians rely on SNAP to help feed themselves and their families, and based on preliminary estimates, the new cuts will equate to roughly 6 billion fewer meals each year nationwide.
When taking a step back to examine the effect on children in our service area, the impact cannot be ignored. Based on Feeding America’s most recent Map the Meal Gap estimates, over 14% of children in our service area are facing food insecurity. With reductions in public benefits and the loss of free and reduced school lunches, this percentage could very well increase.
Unfortunately, we’re already having to make tough decisions as to which schools will receive support from our BackPack Buddies and School Choice Pantry programs this year.
This is a heartbreaking reality. When we can’t reach everyone, that burden falls on the school counselors and teachers who already give so much to our children. They will have to make impossible choices just as we have had to.
As children across our service area prepare to go back to school in just a few weeks, we’re doing everything we can to ensure that hunger will have no place in their classrooms. Even in tough times, we remain steadfast in our commitment to protect the programs that matter most, including BackPack Buddies and School Choice Pantries. We are not stepping back; we are finding new pathways forward.
Food banks are designed to supplement federal assistance, not replace it. We cannot meet the rising need alone, especially with funding still in flux.
At the Food Shuttle, we remain committed to our mission to FEED our neighbors, TEACH self-sufficiency, and GROW healthy foods by cultivating innovative approaches to end hunger, even when times get tough. We are not afraid to make the hard decisions to protect your investment in our mission, and we are committed to being transparent about the weight of those decisions – because we know it’s what you expect from us. Thanks to the support of our donors, partners, agencies, schools, and more, we can ensure that our community stands strong.
Thank you for being on this journey with us, for believing in this work, and for believing in each other. Together, we will remain resilient.