SNAP changes push more North Carolina families to food pantries, food banks

By Jennifer Fernandez

In 2015, a group of concerned Guilford County residents decided to collect food from their neighborhood to help families in need.

That first year, 180 families signed up to give food. Today, more than 4,500 people donate once or twice a month to the nonprofit A Simple Gesture. 

The nonprofit, working with dozens of other organizations and companies, has helped coordinate the collection and distribution of enough food to equal nearly 10 million child-size meals during the past 11 years.

Last year alone, A Simple Gesture and partners collected the equivalent of 2.6 million meals, CEO Leslie Loyd said. All of it went right out the door to families who needed it — reflecting a 25 percent increase in need over the previous year, she said.

And this year, demand is already 20 percent higher than it was at this time last year, she added.

Even as more people are seeking help, food pantries are working with less federal funding and lower output from farmers who are struggling with higher costs for gas and fertilizer, Loyd said. An extended drought has also hurt North Carolina farmers, some of whom had given surplus produce to the pantries in previous years. 

Changes to federal food aid, including new eligibility requirements, are driving more people to seek help — and straining nonprofits’ ability to provide that help, Loyd said. 

“What I used to tell people 10 years ago is food pantries are used, like, short term,” she said. “We’ll see families who might have lost a job and they need the help for an emergency period of time.” 

That’s not what’s happening now. 

“We’re seeing people who are working two or three jobs but don’t have any type of safety … net at all,” she said. “So they get a flat tire. They’re at a pantry. They have an extra medical bill. They have to go to the food pantry.”

“The food pantries are being used as a backstop rather than an emergency,” Loyd continued. “We’re seeing a lot more people, and it’s getting increasingly more difficult to meet the need.” 

Food insecurity

In Guilford County, the third most populous county in the state, an estimated 14.9 percent of residents are food insecure, according to Feeding America, the umbrella organization for many of the nation’s food banks and feeding programs. 

And of the county’s children, 23 percent — almost one in four — don’t know where they’ll get their next meal.

Across the state, at least one in 10 residents experiences food insecurity, with rates as high as one in five in some counties, according to an analysis by the nonprofit, nonpartisan NC Budget and Tax Center. 

Health insurance company UnitedHealthcare estimates North Carolina’s food insecurity is higher — closer to one in seven residents.

Studies show that people who struggle to access nutritious food have poorer long-term health outcomes than those who don’t. They’re more likely to have a poor diet and an increased risk of diet-related diseases — from heart disease to diabetes to certain types of cancer.

For children, food insecurity is associated with developmental risk and other health issues. For example, food insecure children are 1.4 times more likely to have asthma than children who are food secure. 

Hungry children are also more likely to struggle to concentrate at school or when doing homework, according to No Kid Hungry, a national campaign focused on ending childhood hunger.

Changes to federal food aid 

Changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, outlined in the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act law reduced benefits and expanded work requirements to include adults up to age 65, and parents and other caregivers of children age 14 and older. Before the bill passed, families with children up to 18 years of age were eligible for SNAP. The changes started rolling out in October 2025.

Advocates feared the changes would lead to families losing their benefits.

In North Carolina, more than 1.2 million low-income North Carolinians depend on SNAP to help put food on their tables. Current data on how many North Carolina children use SNAP was unavailable. However, historically, a little less than half of the state’s SNAP beneficiaries have been children.

According to state data, SNAP enrollment has dropped by 110,129 people since September 2025. 

Nationally, SNAP participation has dropped by more than 4.5 million people since July 2025, according to an estimate by the national, nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Based on data from 19 states, researchers estimate that the number of children receiving SNAP nationwide has dropped by more than 1.5 million in that time frame. 

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said research has shown that work requirements cut many people off federal food aid without increasing their employment or earnings. With unemployment nationwide flat at about 4 percent for the past year, researchers at the nonprofit said it’s “very unlikely that reduced need is driving the decline in SNAP participation.”

In addition to the SNAP changes, Congress last year cut $1 billion in food aid that once flowed through food banks nationwide. That loss undermined food banks’ ability to help. 

Danielle Moore, chief operations officer at Nourish Up, told NC Health News last year that the 50 percent cut to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina in the federal Emergency Food Assistance Program, commonly referred to as TEFAP, would amount to a million-dollar gap. That would mean fewer fruits, vegetables and frozen meats for the people who get sustenance from the network of food pantries.

In its recently passed budget, the North Carolina General Assembly took steps to address food insecurity. 

Legislators directed $9.1 million in one-time funds to six food banks across the state for the 2026-27 fiscal year. In addition, smaller, one-time grants ranging from $25,000 to $5 million will provide funding for 13 food programs across the state.

‘Just a band aid’

Guilford County’s A Simple Gesture has become a sort of clearinghouse — or hub that helps connect organizations in the county with available food.

Their “green bag” program, in which people fill a bag with donated food, has grown so large that the nonprofit upgraded to routing software used by UPS and Amazon drivers to plan routes for the more than 100 volunteers who pick up the food.

They also put refrigerators in middle and high schools to allow students to share unopened food with fellow students. The program has been copied across the state, Loyd said. 

Their third program reclaims surplus food from grocery stores, restaurants, caterers, corporate cafeterias and schools, and redistributes it to organizations that can get it to people in need.

“We kind of know what all the different pantries are doing, when meals are being served across the community,” Loyd said. “It’s a lot of, like, logistics. But once you kind of know that, we can get food out really quickly, and most of it can be distributed the same day to families.” 

Thanks to those connections, the nonprofit SimpleWays now has access to hundreds of milk cartons that had been going unused every week at nearby Hunter Elementary School. 

One of SimpleWays’ programs focuses on helping families eat healthier. They even have a dietitian on staff. 

A Simple Gesture also helps SimpleWays by sending volunteers to pick up food at its distribution hub and deliver it to seniors, SimpleWays CEO Susan Cox said.

“They’re a fantastic organization,” she said. “They work well with all of their partners they have out in the community.”

SimpleWays focuses on helping people handle whatever crisis brought them in, then supports them in finding stability and creating resilience, Cox said. People typically stay between nine and 12 months before graduating from their program.

In the past year, SimpleWays has seen people seeking help who had to adjust to reduced SNAP benefits, or who lost their benefits entirely, Cox said.

“So far, we have been able to absorb any increase,” she said. “One of the unique things about us, because we also graduate people out of our programs, we can also absorb people who are coming in.”

Advocates like Loyd are worried about the increased dependence on nonprofits. Most people don’t realize that the federal government covers 95 percent of the nation’s food safety net through programs like SNAP, she said.

“Every nonprofit and church and grandmother making sandwiches on the corner is only the last 5 percent,” Loyd said. “Now they’re trying to flip flop that, and it’s going to be devastating.”

Food nonprofits are important in building community and showing that people care. But they are “just a band aid,” she said.

“I think we need to have the political will to end hunger in our country,” Loyd said.

The post SNAP changes push more North Carolina families to food pantries, food banks appeared first on North Carolina Health News.