It was bananas on the ground floor of the Fairbanks Community Food Bank on the afternoon of Nov. 10. A dozen volunteers rapidly unloaded produce, packed boxes and wheeled carts around towering metal shelves.
In the middle of the chaos, Anne Weaver, the food bank’s CEO, inspected a food box destined for a household in need.
“This box is for a single mom with a child,” she said, rifling through a collection of cans and jars until her hand landed on a carton with festive holly leaves printed on it. “This particular box also appears to have some eggnog. If we have treats, we're able to share them. But the goal is to have breakfast, lunch and dinner items.”
The Trump administration paused and reduced SNAP benefits early this month. Though Congress is taking steps toward reopening the government, the lapse in putting pressure on folks who already struggle with Alaska food prices — especially in the Interior, where the cold is setting in and utility bills are starting to climb.
Weaver said that, in a normal year, the arrival of winter and the looming holidays would already make this their busy season. But she said the food bank has been seeing even more demand during the government shutdown.
“We were receiving calls from folks like, ‘Hey, I've made a good wage, but now I have no income. And so now, instead of being one of the donors, I need to be one of the recipients,’” she said. “There are emergencies you can't plan for. So, with our emergency food boxes, we say, you get up to 10 of them in a calendar year — and hugs to you as you're going through this.”
Weaver said the food bank is rising to the occasion. She has a fleet of volunteers to box up the donations that are pouring in from businesses, nonprofits, and individuals across town. Even local students are getting involved. Four middle schools across the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District are competing to collect the most canned food donations before Nov. 19.
The government shutdown motivated Heather Johnson, the principal of Tanana Middle School, to reach out to other middle schools and turn their annual food drive into something bigger and more competitive.
“With our school being about 53% military, I know that a lot of our kids and families are going to be affected by all of this,” she said. “So, I wanted to make sure that we were able to reach as many people in our community as possible.”
Johnson said she’s seen a passionate response from students and parents alike. The winning school will get a pizza party.
But the outlook is less bright elsewhere in the community.
Hannah Hill is the director of the Bread Line, a soup kitchen in Fairbanks. Hill said they’ve seen a “cascade of harm” after government benefits lapsed, and the soup kitchen is serving 1,000 more meals a month than usual.
“It's very disruptive to people who are already living in a very vulnerable and marginalized-type of way economically,” they said.
Even before the federal shutdown, the state SNAP backlog kept thousands of Alaskans from receiving government benefits. Hill said every time there’s a disruption like that, traffic picks up at the soup kitchen. But they say what happens outside the Bread Line frightens them even more. According to Feeding America, one of the nation’s largest anti-hunger organizations, for every one meal that's provided by a local charity like the Bread Line, SNAP provides nine.
Things are also getting tight over at the Fairbanks Senior Center. Darlene Supplee, the center’s executive director, said it’s always been challenging to feed Fairbanks’ aging population, which is quickly becoming the largest in Alaska. The center’s Meals on Wheels program has a 35-person wait list. She said she expects it to grow even longer with the SNAP benefit lapse.
“Due to winter time, seniors will not drive,” she said. “So, we'll have a lot of silent hunger behind closed doors out of the sheer timing of the SNAP benefits not being available to our senior population.”
Back at the Fairbanks Food Bank, Weaver was surveying boxes of food stacked almost two stories high. She said she expects it’ll be a rough road ahead, through the holidays. But her recipients’ stories keep her going — like one she heard from a local school nurse, who connected with a hungry student.
“Mary was eight,” Weaver said. “The parents were doing absolutely everything that they could. Her dad's car kept breaking. They didn't have the money to fix the car, which meant he couldn't be reliable at work. And her school nurse was able to give her a granola bar and send her back to class and then start making phone calls.”
Weaver said that’s how Mary’s family got on the Fairbanks Food Bank’s emergency food box calendar, which helped feed them until they could get back on their feet. Weaver said she’ll think about the power of that one granola bar in the days to come.