A coalition of 36 Dane County food pantries released a letter to the community on Tuesday, sounding an alarm about the rising number of people facing food insecurity and the need for both immediate support and longer-term solutions to the challenges of distributing enough food to meet the growing need.
The letter, published as a full-page ad in Tuesday’s print edition of the Wisconsin State Journal, begins: “Dane County, we need your help.” The cost of the ad was co-sponsored by United Way of Dane County and the newspaper.
“As Dane County food pantries, we serve thousands of people in our community each day. Our shared mission is to make sure our neighbors don’t face hunger,” the letter said. “But we are facing a serious challenge.”
The food pantries also held a press conference Tuesday morning at the state Capitol, where they were scheduled to be joined by local officials and community leaders, including Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway; Janel Heinrich, executive director of Public Health Madison & Dane County; state legislators; county supervisors; and other invited guests.
Their call to action comes as visits to many pantries in the fastest-growing county in Wisconsin have more than doubled in the past two years. The result of this increased need is pantries are spending more money on food than ever before as the options they have to keep shelves stocked “continue to shift and are more limited than they were just a few years ago,” the letter said. The pantries stress that buying food in bulk is more expensive now and the traditional suppliers of free food for pantries can’t keep up with the demand.
Pantry leaders said the pressure will rise in the coming weeks as kids have less access to free food with schools out for the summer.
The food pantries’ letter explained what is driving demand, including higher food prices, dramatic increases in rent, and the fact that federal assistance that helped people make ends meet during the pandemic is gone. The most recent data on food insecurity in Dane County shows an increase in people not having enough to eat and not knowing where their next meal is coming from. According to the Mind the Meal Gap report recently released by Feeding America, nearly 13% of kids in Dane County were food insecure in 2022, up from 7.5% in 2021. That increase was even before local pantries started seeing sharp upticks in demand.
The pantries also urged local, county, state, and federal officials, as well as other community leaders, to help find long-term solutions to food insecurity.
