Worcester Business Journal

8 Worcester Business Journal | May 15, 2023 | wbjournal.com During the first year of the pandem- ic, the number of households being helped by the food bank had increased 15% by February 2021 from February 2020, said McMurray. By February 2022, that increase had gone down by 7%, said McMurray, citing unemploy- ment compensation and SNAP benefits as aiding individuals and families in having the resources to purchase ample food. As pandemic evolved and benefits began to sunset, however, the number of people going to the food bank is back up. February 2023 numbers were 30% higher than February 2022, said McMurray. "What the pandemic taught us was that the government is the only entity that can scale up quickly to respond to a crisis of that level. Government programs were working and having the biggest impact," she said. Gov. Maura Healey's administration has extended through June the addi- tional SNAP benefits past the federal endpoint in March, which is allowing for extra benefits at 40% of what the federal government provided through- out the pandemic. But a cliff is coming, if it is not yet here, and it is falling on nonprofit orga- nizations to fill those gaps. Grant funding is harder to get Community Harvest Project helps its partners by providing free, nutri- tious, local food otherwise potentially unavailable, but while government funding for individuals is changing, so is the way organizations are accessing grants. "In some ways grant funding was easier during the pandemic," said Buer- schaper, citing reduced requirements for applications and an additional awareness of the needs of the commu- nity that were present over the past few years. "Now focuses are changing, and priorities from funders are changing." While the total amount of grant funding has remained the same, the work that goes into courting new op- portunities is altered, she said. Community Harvest Project relies on grants for 45% of its annual operat- ing budget, said Buerschaper. While volunteer labor helps the farm do what it does, the farm also relies on essential equipment to work efficiently and move the hundreds of thousands of pounds of food from the farm to where people can access it. e nonprofit has an annual budget of $1.1 million, according to the most recent tax filings made available on the data service Guidestar. e organization receives two kinds of grants: those allowing for the continuation of existing programs, and those allowing for risk taking, perhaps resulting in ways to better serve the community, said Buerschaper. In 2022, the organization received grants of each of those kinds from the benefits, and child tax credits made some individuals more food secure in the pandemic than they were before or are now, said Erin McAleer, pres- ident and CEO of Project Bread, a Boston-based nonprofit that does ad- vocacy work in addition to connecting individuals with resources. "Issues were exacerbated during the pandemic, but existing issues were also exposed," said McAleer. As of March, 22.2% of households with children in Massachusetts were food insecure, according to Project Bread. is is up from a pre-pandem- ic rate of less than 9%, and a mid-pandemic low of 12.5% in April 2021. "ese dif- ferent programs started to be peeled back," said McAleer. "Food insecurity has been slowly rising since then." In the Greater Worcester area spe- cifically, McMurray has seen this play out as more individuals and families are coming to access food offered at the food bank. "e situation with food insecurity in our communities is worse than it was during the pandemic", said McMurray e hunger problem BY ISABEL TEHAN WBJ Staff Writer T he model at Community Harvest Project, a non- profit farm and orchard in Graon and Harvard, is unique in the way it makes food available for donation. On a given week in the summer, more than 300 volunteers help harvest the 320 million pounds of produce the farm produces each year. Its 6,000 annual volunteers come to the farm year round, in smaller numbers during the winter, supple- menting CHP's six full-time and six part-time employees who manage 15 acres of farmland in Graon and 30 orchard acres in Harvard. Community Harvest Project does not distribute food directly, but rather part- ners with 23 other organizations in what Executive Director Tori Buerschaper de- scribes as a business-to-business model. Calling itself volunteer farming for hunger relief, Community Harvest Project's food donations have become more critical than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they remain so now as pandemic emergency declara- tion-related federal and state emergency allotments end and the costs of food continue to rise. "We are hearing from our partners that our produce is so critical right now because of increasing costs across the board," said Buerschaper. Inflation, increased costs of other essentials, and ending federal programs have made the end of the pandemic anything but the end of a heightened food insecurity prob- lem, said Jean McMurray, CEO of the Worcester County Food Bank. "All these things created yet another crisis in addition to the pandemic," said McMurray. The growing hunger problem Food insecurity is defined as a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food, according to the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Government programs like universal free school meals, additional Supple- mental Nutrition Assistance Program As pandemic-era assistance comes to an end, nonprofits like Community Harvest Project battle against rising food insecurity while grant funding is harder to obtain Tori Buerschaper, executive director of Community Harvest Project Jean McMurray, CEO of the Greater Worcester Food Bank Erin McAleer, CEO of Project Bread Community Harvest Project has 15 acres of farmland in Grafton. PHOTO | COURTESY OF COMMUNITY HARVEST PROJECT

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