BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank may have to start cutting back on how much they give each family after six bonus shipments of food from the USDA were cancelled.
“When you start looking at what your food supply is going to be and what your inventory’s going to be, it’s a major concern,” Mike Manning, CEO and President of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, said.
Manning says six shipments of food from the USDA were expected to arrive in the first three months of the year, but they found out several weeks ago that they had been canceled.
“Those types of things create uncertainty. Our inventory is already being challenged, so we’re going to have to adjust some things and see what we can do to continue to feed people,” Manning said.
While they do not know the reason for the cancellations, Manning says it’s a big concern, especially with the summer quickly approaching.
“Summers are always challenging for us to be able to raise food and funds because people are distracted with vacation, kids out of school, so we do really well from September through the end of the year. That’s when we have our most success, but we need to try to be successful in these off months to really try to address the problem,” Manning said.
One way they are looking at adapting to the losses is by cutting back on how much each family gets.
“It’s an uncertain situation when you look, we’ve been moving up the amount of poundage we distribute to an individual per month, consistently trying to move that up. And now what we’re going to have to look at is potentially moving it back from the 25 pounds we’ve been able to donate to roll back to probably 20 and then potentially move on further down from there, because the last thing we want to do is deny somebody food assistance or have to tell them sorry we can’t assist you, you’re at the end of the line and we ran out,” Manning said.
Manning says these cuts could come as soon as next month, but there are still ways you can help.
“We appreciate anybody stepping up to help; this community has always helped us,” Manning said. “It’s really important because we’ve been doing this for 40 years, and it’s important for us to continue to make a difference in our community.”
If you are interested in donating or volunteering at the food bank, click here.
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