Minnesota food shelves in need of community support to help families this Thanksgiving

Food Shelves across Minnesota are stocking up in anticipation of more shoppers.

The Food Group reports there were 7.5 million food shelf visits last year, and they expect that number to grow by one million by the end of this year. They say inflation and overall increase in living expenditures is the reason for the big increase.

“This is unprecedented. We saw a 35% increase in the number of households who are coming to access the food shelf, 60% of the visits are brand new families,” said Executive Director of Prism Food Shelf Marketplace Michelle Ness.

She said they have 300-400 visits a week.

“We’ve got people from over 120 cities in the state of Minnesota that will come here to PRISM,” she said. “This is the busy time leading up to Thanksgiving, leading up to the holidays. We always see more people coming through the door.”

Ness doesn’t expect the need to slow down, and neither does Stephanie Lehman at Anoka County Brotherhood Council (ACBC) Food Shelf.

“I’ve worked in this kind of industry for over 10 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it and it’s really, it’s really hard to watch our families going through it because, we have a lot of, most of our families are hard-working, trying to make it, and it’s just not enough,” Lehman said.

She said they serve around 2,000 families a month. She said they have doubled the number of people serving from two years ago.

“We see a lot of people who are just on the bubble, never have needed a food shelf before and now they need it, so we’ve really seen our numbers go up. We’ve served 30% more families than this time last year,” she said.

Lehman said they rely on the community to help keep their shelves stocked. She said donations are down, but she knows it’s a difficult time for many people.

“We are in this kind of weird thing where we are trying to manage less food from the grocery stores, manage the influx of people and then manage the donor retention,” Lehman said. “We get a lot of food from grocery stores each day and we’re really tried to grow that program because what’s happened is the grocery store giving has declined so we try to add stores to compensate.”

She said they have increased their monthly food budget, so they can continue to provide for the community.

“We have really increased our budgets and especially for culturally appropriate food as well as the demographics of our food shelf has shifted it’s been really important to us to try and manage that with our food purchasing,” Lehman said.

Ness said their budget has doubled over the past two years.

“We spend about $20,000 a month purchasing food. We also get donations from locally grocery stores, community members and congregations,” she said.

Ness said their ability to serve thousands of families a month is because of the support they receive from the community.

“We’re able to do this work because the community supports us, so we’re carrying out the will of the community by helping others,” Ness said. “I worry that folks think somebody else is making a donation or being engaged and the reality is we need so many more people to help.”

Both women said they don’t want to change the shopping experience for their families and encourage people to donate what they can no matter how little.

PRISM will be the New Hope Hy-Vee on Tuesday Nov. 19 to fill a truck of donated food. ACBC will be having their Thanksgiving food distribution on Friday to help around 500 families.

Both organizations said they are looking forward to Give to the Max Day this Thursday, Nov. 21 to help replenish their shelves.

“It’s so much more than a bag of a food, and we know that bag of food or cart helps to stretch budgets and that’s exactly what families need right now,” Ness said.