In Greenwich, a gold-standard food pantry. But others struggle

The Neighbor to Neighbor food pantry in Greenwich receives scores of generous donations from the community: lettuce and squash from regenerative farms and kitchen gardens, bread from a local bakery and hundreds of fat, organic turkeys at Thanksgiving.

This pantry, in one of the wealthiest enclaves in the nation, is anything but average.

Not only is the food on the pantry’s shelves top-tier, the community’s fundraising efforts are also innovative. Schools in Greenwich have their own “Neighbor to Neighbor” clubs, which marshal donations to the pantry. An annual fundraiser offers residents an ingeniously frictionless way of giving — food left on local doorsteps is taken to Neighbor to Neighbor by their mail carrier.

Generous community members also sponsor special items each month, like new sets of sheets or winter coats. In July, new Under Armor backpacks were distributed for back-to-school.

Food pantries across the state rely on private fundraising to supplement federal and state support. But not all food pantries in Connecticut have such well-resourced communities of potential donors to tap.

So while inflation unleashed during COVID has continued to pinch household food budgets, pushing huge numbers of people across the state to turn to food pantries to get through the month, pantries in the towns with the most need often find it most difficult to meet that demand.

In fact, state funding in Connecticut to support pantries is minute. For the more than 600 pantries around the state, Connecticut allocated just $1 million of Nutrition Assistance Funding for fiscal years 2024 and 2025. That’s less than a third of Neighbor to Neighbor’s expenses in a single year.

Like Connecticut’s 169 municipalities, pantries are largely independent islands, excelling or struggling to serve clients based on unequal local realities.

The Greenwich gold standard

With its impressive community support, Greenwich’s Neighbor to Neighbor is able to set a gold standard for what a food pantry might be. Clients can visit weekly, and they push shopping carts around a perpetually well-stocked room. The produce section is packed with bok choy, potatoes, yellow squash, peppers and cucumbers, and refrigerators are full of fresh blueberries donated from a New York farmer each summer, along with eggs, milk, cheese and meat. In Greenwich, they virtually never run out of tuna fish, rice or beans, because when stocks run low, they simply use their budget to buy more.

Like most food pantries, Neighbor to Neighbor offers canned goods, but here, those shelf-stable products are overshadowed by the abundance of fresh food offered. In fact, clients at Neighbor to Neighbor take home 75% fresh food, an extraordinary ratio that the pantry maintains even when local produce dwindles during the winter.

“Honestly, if you ask people, they don’t want cans,” says Duncan Lawson, the manager of Neighbor to Neighbor. “What we’re trying to do this year — we’re trying to go 100% fresh.”

Lawson, who formerly worked in finance, epitomizes the other asset abundant on the Gold Coast: business savvy. Like Lawson, many volunteers at Neighbor to Neighbor come from corporate and financial backgrounds, and their connections to brands, as well as their marketing and investment knowledge, make this nonprofit run more like an innovative business than a charity (Neighbor to Neighbor’s June 2023 tax filing showed more than $3 million in annual expenses and more than $9 million in assets, including more than $2 million invested in publicly traded securities).

During COVID, while most food pantry managers were simply trying to figure out how to get food to clients and socially distance, Lawson saw the cold hard facts of a commodities market.

“To me it was just like trading — you buy low, sell high.” To that end, Greenwich’s board empowered Lawson to pre-purchase food, anticipating the inflation that pushed prices upward.

Lawson has also worked to recruit volunteers, many of them from local hedge funds, to work in the pantry. And those volunteers soon become donors.

Some may wonder why wealthy Greenwich needs a pantry at all, but the cost of living in town is brutally high. Many of their clients, new immigrants to the United States, want to stay within the desirable school district for their kids but struggle to make rent on their salaries.

Luis Egusquiza, a 44-year-old father of three, moved to Greenwich from Peru about a year ago. He cooks full time at an Italian restaurant and has been coming to the pantry nearly as long as he’s been in the U.S.

“It’s expensive to live here. Rents keep going up,” he said. But the pantry helps him get the basics for his family.

“What we don’t get here, we buy at the store, but rent uses up most of our income,” he said. Egusquiza pays $3,300 each month for a three-bedroom apartment with no living room.

“The perception is only rich people live here,” Lawson, the pantry manager, said, “but my argument to that is, ‘well, who cuts your grass and does your child care, and who cleans your house?’ Because they’re not sitting in a $2 million mansion cleaning yours.”

Fairfield County inequality

Meanwhile, less than 30 miles up I-95 in Bridgeport, Nicholas Martinez winced when asked about the empty bins at the food pantry he runs in the Thomas Merton Family Center. As the pantry neared its closing time, shelf-stable goods remained, but in the produce section, there were just a few bins left: onions, turnips and deep yellow bananas.

“I don’t really have much upstairs right now. My next shipment gets in on Friday,” Martinez said. That afternoon, he took a few hundred dollars from a recent donation drive and bought the cheapest produce he could find — apples, onions, potatoes. “Things I can get a lot of.”

In Bridgeport, 22.5% of the population lives below the poverty line, according to the most recent census data, and the Thomas Merton pantry is only able to provide one visit per month to its clients — compared to weekly visits at Greenwich’s Neighbor to Neighbor. It’s frustrating for Martinez to carefully ration food for a community so in need.

“If I had enough food, I’d say they could come here three, four times a week,” Martinez said. “The problem is, guess what? The next person behind me is gonna have nothing to take.”

Demand for services at Thomas Merton has tripled in the last six months alone — a rise Martinez attributes both to the pantry’s change to a more visible location and the rising cost of housing and food prices that’s pushing more people to pantries across the U.S.

Liz Martin, a volunteer, has been coming to Thomas Merton for five years from her home in the nearby town of Fairfield. She was inspired after reading a book by the center’s namesake, a Trappist monk, who once wrote, “We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone — we find it with another.”

Despite its location within one of the wealthiest counties in the country, Thomas Merton struggles to attract volunteers like Martin — and the donations that allow Neighbor to Neighbor to consistently fill its shelves with fresh food.

Martin was drawn to Bridgeport out of a desire to “understand what I read about and hear on the news and not be estranged from it. When you’re not in any way connected to the needs of your fellow humans in your country, you can be more judgmental about it.”

But she admits that, despite telling family and friends about her experiences there, she has not succeeded in drawing them to Bridgeport to join her.

Dramatic rise in need

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic set off a huge rise in demand for food assistance, with job losses, rising prices and kids staying at home all contributing to demand.

It’s a rare household that’s immune to the rising cost of milk — from around $3 to $4 between 2019 and 2022, or eggs, from $1.40 to $2.85 in those three years. According to data collected by the United Way of Connecticut, 2-1-1 inquiries about food went from around 48,000 in 2019 to 228,000 in 2020. After a brief dip, pantries say that need has intensified anew, and that’s reflected in the numbers. There were around 160,000 requests in 2022 and 198,000 in 2023.

Salaam Bhatti, the SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit that researches food security, says that rising housing costs, especially acute in Connecticut, are inextricably linked to pressure on pantries.

“It’s the ‘rent eats first,’ phenomenon,” Bhatti said. “Most of a family’s budget goes toward rent, utilities. Then the grocery budget takes a hit. Parents will skip meals so their children can eat. We see kids who are eating their last meal of the week at school on Friday, going hungry and not eating until they’re in school again on Monday.”

The pandemic helped reduce some of the stigma around receiving supplemental food — and that’s a positive change that might ensure that the child Bhatti referenced eats over the weekend.

Karen Thomas says she’s seen this changing attitude play out in Torrington as director of the Friendly Hands Food Bank. There, clients were able to pull up in their cars during the pandemic, making the experience more private, and the group also put on food giveaways where they didn’t ask the usual screening questions about income levels. That helped bring out some folks who hadn’t visited a pantry before.

The numbers in Torrington are shocking. Friendly Hands served 300 households each month before the pandemic. Now it serves 6,000. Of those, two client groups are growing: unhoused people, and those with full time jobs. Some former donors have even become clients.

“In some cases, it’s a husband and a wife, and they both have jobs, and they have kids, and they can’t keep up with the bills,” Thomas said. “How do you look at your child’s face when they say, ‘I’m hungry,’ and you tell them, ‘We don’t have enough food’ or ‘You can’t eat that, we’re saving that’?”

And that’s where the resources surrounding a pantry come into play. While most pantries surveyed said the quantity of food they can provide per client has gone down as demand has gone up, Neighbor to Neighbor has managed to serve nearly twice as many clients as it did pre-COVID without cutting back.

Islands of aid

Food pantries differ dramatically, and those differences don’t just reflect local economic realities. Depending on whether a pantry is run by a large institution or a church, a few volunteers or a professional group, there can be tremendous variations.

And you don’t have to go far to see the differences between pantries. Even in the same ZIP code, or in the case of Hartford, the same city block, pantries serve the public in dramatically different ways.

To some extent, that’s just a function of the role they play within the organizations that run them. Loaves and Fishes Community Kitchen has a food focus, whereas the Institute for Hispanic Families offers a pantry in addition to its programs for seniors and preschoolers. Some pantries pop up once every couple of weeks and are run solely by volunteers. Recently, clients lined up for hours in the July sun to receive pre-packed bags of groceries at one small Hartford pantry, while still others operate through well-resourced hospital systems, where both clients and staff have access.

Going to one pantry doesn’t prohibit a client from visiting another, so some families may visit a pantry with more fresh produce and another where they receive more shelf-stable goods to get through the month.

Connecticut Foodshare

Connecticut Foodshare, which serves around 600 pantries across the state, tries to level the playing field by consolidating food donations and creating partnerships with supermarkets to stretch dollars further.

Because the massive nonprofit can buy food at cost and store a tremendous amount in its warehouses, Connecticut Foodshare can take advantage of opportunities that might pass a smaller food bank by. A fortuitous offer from a company to offload a truck packed with juice or milk, for example, can only be housed in a massive facility until it can be distributed across pantries. The group also has a mobile distribution program, through which it creates pop-up pantries in 113 locations across the state.

Some of the food distributed by Connecticut Foodshare comes from The Emergency Food Assistance Program, TEFAP. Some food comes to Foodshare from large grocery chains like Stop & Shop and Big Y, and some food retailer donations are facilitated by the national nonprofit, Feeding America. Still more food is purchased by the food bank from wholesalers at a deep discount, so it can resell that food to individual pantries with no markup.

Connecticut Foodshare requires its partner pantries to give the TEFAP food they distribute to any Connecticut resident who meets certain income criteria. Some pantries — like Neighbor to Neighbor — promote themselves as a service for locals. And it’s true that the Under Armor Backpacks and farm-fresh blueberries that the pantry privately works to secure for clients are not part of that TEFAP contribution. So while any Nutmegger should be able to come to Neighbor to Neighbor and get those items, the pantry can restrict the rest of what they offer to Greenwich residents.

Baking a bigger pie

While Connecticut Foodshare makes more free and cheap food accessible statewide, it can only distribute what it gets. Most of what the food bank gives to pantries must be donated. That’s either excess food from sources like grocery stores and wholesalers or donations of money the group can then spend on food.

The overall pie of food that Connecticut Foodshare divvies up is large, but it gets split into many pieces, said president and CEO Jason Jakubowski.

“If we have two pantries, two pantries are getting two halves of the pie. If we have 600 pantries, they’re getting much smaller slices of the pie,” Jakubowski said. Thomas Merton in Bridgeport can only get a piece so big from Connecticut Foodshare, its main source of food, and that means its supplies run low by mid-week. To change that, Thomas Merton would either need more local donations, or Connecticut Foodshare would have to make the pie bigger, allowing them a thicker slice.

During the pandemic, Connecticut Foodshare was able to meet growing demand thanks to federals programs like the American Rescue Plan Act and the Farmers to Families Food Box program, which purchased food from farmers who lost their usual customers, and redistributed that food to people in need. Connecticut Foodshare served as a middleman in the state for that food. But while those resources have dried up, demand for food has not.

“The biggest frustration we have had over the last several years is that the need is about as big as it was at the peak of the pandemic, but the lesser amount of government food has created a donut hole in the system that we simply can’t replace with donated food,” Jakubowski said. “That right there is exactly what keeps me up at night.”

That’s a big hole to fill: Connecticut Foodshare says it received more than 27 million pounds of federal food at the height of the pandemic in 2021, whereas it got just 8 million pounds in 2023.

Jakubowski said it’s possible to fill that hole — or at least try to get close — with more state funding. Around $850,000 was contributed from state funds for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 to Connecticut Foodshare, from a line item of $1 million for nutrition assistance in the Department of Social Services’ budget. Compare that to neighboring states like New Jersey and Massachusetts, which have contributed $85 and $41.5 million respectively to their food banks in recent years.

Jakubowski unsuccessfully advocated for $10 million in state assistance during the 2024 legislative session and says he’ll try again in 2025.

Chris Collibee, Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget spokesman, acknowledged the need.

“Gov. Lamont is extremely thankful for the part that Connecticut’s food banks play in filling gaps for families experiencing food insecurity and recognizes the impact of the rising cost of food,” he said. “The administration is meeting with Connecticut Foodshare in the very near future and, as always, is open to hearing their concerns.”

But those advocating for the issue are frustrated that Connecticut continues to contribute a shadow of what neighbors in the region offer to pantries, especially given the state’s surplus of more than $4 billion.

“When you look at the surplus numbers, it becomes harder and harder to explain why we can’t do something as basic as feed our citizens,” said State Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, a co-sponsor of a 2024 bipartisan bill that proposed $10 million go to food banks.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Foodshare is working to recruit more food donations from businesses. And while the public can donate cans or boxes of food, dollars do more to serve the food insecure. With the prices it gets, Connecticut Foodshare can turn $1 into two meals.

Handing it back

One day last spring, Thomas Merton pantry director Martinez opened the doors to a long line of clients in Bridgeport. Demand was escalating by the week, and the pantry was serving 50 households every day. Seeing the empty bins, one of the pantry’s regular clients handed him $60. His first instinct was to hand it back.

“She said, ‘don’t worry — it’s not for you, it’s for the pantry.’” The woman told Martinez that she believes that everyone should take when they’re in need — but give when they have something to offer. Martinez took the donation and took a break from his shift.

“I locked myself in the bathroom and I just started crying. I felt very grateful.”

It wasn’t, Martinez said, a loaves-and-fishes moment. That $60 could only buy so much. But at a time when Martinez felt like he was drowning, that the pantry couldn’t possibly keep up with the rising tide of demand, that handful of cash gave him something else.

“It’s one of the purest feelings of hope I’ve ever experienced.”

This is the first in a occasional series about food insecurity. Next, some of the creative solutions to fundraising, growing food and more from pantries across the state.