The federal SNAP program helps nearly 47 million Americans put food on the table.

I met one of them today.

She was waiting in line at a food pantry in Albuquerque.  The neighborhood she lives in has always been on the down side of socio economic wellbeing, but these days, it’s really been hit hard.  Her husband was at work, and she was excited because he gets paid on the first of the month.  Since June first falls on a Saturday, the company will pay him on Friday.  The early paycheck will help.

They moved Albuquerque from another state.  I’m judging by her warm, gentle drawl that they’re originally from Oklahoma or East Texas.

“I’ve never seen a state that takes care of people like New Mexico,” she said.  Between a once a month visit to the neighborhood food pantry and her SNAP benefits, she said her family stays fed.

“It’s never enough, but we can get by.  We used to get more from food stamps, but it keeps getting lower and lower,” she explained.

As her husband worked more hours, earning more pay, they qualify for less and less SNAP benefits.  That’s the way the Supplemental Food Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps works.  As your ‘relative need’ for assistance decreases, so does the amount placed on your SNAP EBT card.  It’s a hand up, not a hand out as our politicians love to say.

I’m sure the increase in her husband’s pay cannot keep pace with the cuts to her benefits.  And, if she can find a job in this economy, her check would barely cover day care for their children.  It’s a tough spot that many working people find themselves in these days.

But this afternoon, she seemed happy.  She smiled as she left the food pantry.  She had a couple of sacks of groceries to take home to her husband and kids. Today she would be getting by.

Jason Riggs is the SNAP Outreach Coordinator at Roadrunner Food Bank.

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of working at a US Postal Service substation for the annual National Association of Letter Carriers’ Stamp Out Hunger food drive.  This is the largest single-day food drive in the country every year and it relies on all kinds of people to come together to pull it off.  From the hardworking Letter Carriers who fit the food collection into their normal hours while on their routes that day, to volunteers who give up part of their Saturday to stand, schlep, sort and sweat, to Food Bank staff who put in an extra day that week, to the US Postal Service who approve delivery of the collection bags and use of their facilities, to sponsors like Campbell’s Soup Company and AARP and the coordination of our national organization Feeding America and, most-importantly, to donors across the country who take the time to put food out that day.  (more…)

Because he lives in Toronto and it’s expensive to text or talk on the phone, my uncle writes me letters. How nice it is to walk out to the mailbox and see my name on an envelope that isn’t a bill of some sort. What’s even better is the thrill I get from slipping a note into the mail, knowing he’ll get it in a few days. Who knew old-fashioned snail mail could still be so exciting?

Buying a book of stamps and sending my uncle letters is a tiny blip on my budget radar. In fact, I often buy them at the grocery store at the same time I’m overindulging on food for a new recipe or spending too much money on an imported bottle of wine just because I like the way the label looks. In those moments it’s easy to be wasteful and forget that nearly 17 million children in the United States will probably go without food today. (more…)

Thirty years ago when I worked in my first food bank in Amarillo, we always talked about the dual nature of our mission.  We have always existed to feed hungry people, and the most important part of every communication we have ever delivered is about who is hungry, about how many hungry people there are, and about the effects of hunger on individuals and on our society.  In thirty years that message has never changed, never wavered, never been diluted.  And it never will be as long as we exist.

We have always had another aspect to our work—one that is also very, very important.  Somewhere along the way over the decades, we stopped talking about this other aspect of our work.  We were certainly created in the beginning to feed hungry people.  The main way we did that was—and still is—to take food that would otherwise go to waste and channel that food to hungry people.  I wrote in another blog about the amount of food we waste in our country and about the environmental impact of all of that food ending up in landfills.  I can’t quit thinking about the fact that a quarter of the methane gas in our atmosphere is the result of food ending up in the landfills rather than being eaten. (more…)

For many non-profits, volunteers are viewed the backbone of the organization. Roadrunner’s volunteers are viewed in this same way. They put in thousandss upon thousands of hours and dedicate themselves to a cause that they truly care about. In the United States, 83.9 million adults volunteer and their contribution is worth over $239 billion! Volunteering in America has a long legacy that dates back more than a hundred years. Today, I wanted to share information that I found about the history of volunteering here in America.

How Volunteering Began
In the early 19th century, few formal charitable organizations existed to help people in need. Because the wealthy were not obligated to give back to the poor, in Tudor England the government began to charge a tax on landowners and used this to help the poor. Farmers would also pitch in to help each other with large projects like raising a barn. (more…)

Despite the fact that I work at a Food Bank, it still amazes me that so many people in America struggle with hunger daily. How can we be one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world, yet people living in America are literally starving? What makes me even more upset is the fact that there are thousands of American children that don’t have access to enough food. It just doesn’t seem right that a child living in “the greatest county in the world” would go to bed hungry. I think about my childhood and how fortunate I was growing up. Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was truly very fortunate to have the food I needed to learn and develop properly. It never occurred to me that there were children out there, children just like me, who weren’t getting enough to eat. It wasn’t until I was much older when I realized that hunger was a serious problem in America, not only for the homeless folks living on the streets, but for working families, seniors and children. Unfortunately, for tens of thousands of children living in New Mexico, this realization comes a lot earlier than it did for me. The realization comes much earlier for them because they are the ones who are hungry. (more…)

Once every year I request client stories from our Mobile Food Pantry sites.  These are the stories you all hear, read, and talk about when discussing what food insecurity looks like for our clients across the state.  When I read them, I see the common trend of job loss, homelessness, grandparents raising grandchildren, and choosing between rent and food.  However, this last time, I realized there is a hidden tale within the client stories, and one we do not talk about as often.

It’s the story of our site volunteers.  They take the time and energy to coordinate the distribution, find additional volunteer help, secure a distribution site and on and on to ensure that client’s right in their own backyard have access to food.  Many of them have full-time jobs or other commitments, but they always find the time to lend a hand.

And each client story sent to me is not just the story of the individual being helped, but written by a volunteer telling a story.  It is written from their own perspective and conveyed with their own emotions about helping the hungry.  You read and witness through their own words the commitment and the impact these volunteers have in our community.  (more…)

During political campaigns we are all encouraged to “get out and vote” (or “rock the vote” for the younger generation) and during these campaigns we all have had that moment when we wonder “Does my vote really make a difference?”  Well, now you have a chance to vote for something local and, yes, your vote will make the difference!

Roadrunner Food Bank has submitted a proposal to Walmart’s Fighting Hunger Together campaign for the Roadrunner Food Bank’s Food for Kids Program. When I visited the food bank, this was one of the programs that really hit home for me. My mom was an elementary school teacher for 25 years and she saw many children with great potential who didn’t have enough to eat and how it impacted their education and daily lives. (more…)

Thanks for asking!  We’re a network of five member food banks that provide emergency food support to more than 400 agencies around the state.  Our members are:

• The Community Pantry – Gallup
• ECHO, Inc. – Farmington
• The Food Bank of Eastern New Mexico – Clovis
• The Food Depot – Santa Fe
• Roadrunner Food Bank – with branches in Albuquerque and Las Cruces

Each food bank serves a specific area (see the map below), and we work together as an association to maximize our distribution and buying power.  Our main program is the Fresh Produce Initiative.  The association purchases truck load quantities of fresh produce from around the country and then distributes it out to our member food banks to supplement their other purchased and donated food.  That food then goes out to programs in every county in New Mexico to feed the nearly 40,000 New Mexicans who seek food assistance every week. (more…)

A wonderful gift is coming to the Food Bank that will allow us to expand our role in helping veterans.  Recently, Roadrunner Food Bank was notified of a $40,000 private gift coming from a donor who wants the money to be used to specifically support veterans’ programs throughout the state.  The funds could be used for any veterans’ project such as infrastructure to help current programs expand their assistance to veterans, capital improvements to program sites, or as seed money to help jumpstart new programs.  Additionally, the gift is not restricted just to agencies currently serving veterans, but any agency expanding services to veterans or wishing to reach veterans.

Although the gift sounds like a lot of money, when you consider that it will be available to veterans programs statewide it becomes clear that we have to be judicious in how these funds will be utilized.  Recently, the Food Bank hosted a project meeting on March 12, 2013, to begin a discussion on how we can best apply the funds being given. (more…)