Annie Carlson has run the St. Patrick’s Food Pantry in Buffalo for seven years, long enough to know most of the people it serves as “our St. Patrick’s family.”
But in the past year, she has seen the number of people coming to the weekly pantry double, from about 30 households to more than 75. On a recent Wednesday, she gave out boxes of emergency food for a total of 141 people, she said.
U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand says her office has spent years trying to talk supermarket chains into locating on Buffalo’s East Side and other low-income communities, to no avail. Now she wants to offer them financial incentives to do it.
It is a trend that emergency food providers throughout the state are experiencing since the minimum benefit for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program dropped from $95 a month to $23 as of March 2023. That was the expiration date for the government’s Emergency Allotment bill, which increased SNAP benefits from March 2020 through February 2023 to help people through the pandemic.
“We actually saw fewer people during the pandemic because they were more comfortable when they were getting the extra benefits,” Carlson said. “Since it expired, we are seeing a lot more new clients who aren’t in our pantry family.”
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