Local · Trusted · Free
The Morning Impact — your neighborhood's most important stories, delivered every morning.
Serving 29 counties across Southwest Texas, the San Antonio Food Bank provides for over 577,000 residents in need each year.
President and CEO Eric Cooper said the nonprofit provides aid to around 120,000 individuals per week.
What residents should know
The food bank helps to nourish the community in three different ways.
“We frame our work in the three areas that we call food for today, food for tomorrow, and food for a lifetime,” Cooper said.
Food for today allows those in need to go straight to the food bank to get supplies, while food for tomorrow involves long-term food assistance programs.
Lastly, food for a lifetime involves indefinite services that assist residents with employment and career development.
Managing the impact
As the United States federal government continues its shutdown, Cooper said that the San Antonio Food Bank may see direct impacts on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, program which bank recipients can enroll in.
Although more people in the region may need to receive direct help, Cooper added that furloughed federal workers who make up a portion of San Antonio's population may also be in line for assistance.
“There’s about 189,000 federal workers and government contractors that call San Antonio home,” Cooper said. “That’s a demographic that if they miss their paychecks [due to the shutdown], they will need food.”
Aside from those workers, around 279,000 Bexar County residents alone rely on SNAP benefits to get regular food, Cooper said.
“They, too, will need to come and get food from us," he said.
As a result, Cooper said the food bank may see an increase in need over the next few months and into the holiday season.
To address this anticipated increase, Cooper said the food bank is ramping up activity to meet the demands of the community.
“We’re just working to try and make sure no one else goes hungry,” Cooper said.
Even when the government reopens, Cooper still anticipates an increase in regional demands due to new federal provisions to the SNAP program.
To learn more about the San Antonio Food Bank and ways to help, visit their website below.
