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Catholic Community Services saw record-high demand for food last year. Its suppliers now face cuts and funding is drying up, so the nonprofit must scale back.
A nonprofit running two local food pantries will reduce services starting Sept. 3, due to funding cuts.
Catholic Community Services, which operates one free food pantry in Eugene and another in Springfield, will now allow people to pick up food boxes from only one location per week, instead of both. The change comes as local demand for affordable food surges while supply dwindles due to high costs, federal funding cuts and grant expirations.
The nonprofit’s community center in Eugene, which houses one pantry, is at 1464 W. Sixth Ave. Its Springfield center is at 1025 G St.
“Our new policy, starting in early September, is going to be one pantry visit a week,” CCS Executive Director Lorri Perreault told Lookout Eugene-Springfield. “We’re hoping that will stretch out our food supply so that everyone still can get served.”
Last fiscal year, which ended June 30, CCS distributed 38,748 boxes of food through its two pantries in Eugene and Springfield — the nonprofit’s highest volume of distributed food on record. That number marks a 14.5% increase from the year before and a 110% increase over the past three years.
About 18,000 individuals visited the two community centers last fiscal year, Perreault said, a 14% increase from the year before and a 106% increase over the last three. She said many of those individuals visit both locations every week to pick up food.
The nonprofit can no longer keep up with that demand due to disruptions in both its local and federal food supply and funding sources.
In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture canceled deliveries to food banks and programs that fund local farm-to-table networks. The USDA supplies Oregon Food Bank, which supplies nonprofit Food for Lane County, which, in turn, supplies partners like Catholic Community Services. The cancellations caused Food for Lane County to lose 20% of its food supply.
“Our primary food supplier historically has been Food for Lane County, an excellent, amazing partner, but they have felt the food supply crunch,” Perreault said. “We’re the largest distributor of their food in Lane County, and so it trickles down to us.”
Though Food for Lane County used to never purchase its own food, it began to do so after receiving additional federal funds through the Oregon Food Bank network and local support during the pandemic. It distributes that food to pantries like Catholic Community Services.
That pot of money is now drying up, leading its purchasing budget to drop from about $1.5 million last fiscal year to about $750,000. That’s caused the nonprofit to reduce purchases like bread and milk and stop purchases of butter, chorizo, tortillas or queso fresco entirely.
“As we’ve gotten further and further away from those dollars, that era of having all of that extra cash to spend on food, we’re now hitting the point where we have to cut back on the amount of food that we can purchase,” said Carolyn Stein, executive director of Food for Lane County.
When staff at Catholic Community Services found out about the cuts and funding changes coming to Food for Lane County, they began to seek out supplemental funding sources through grants from community partners like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Lane Community Health Council.
That allowed the food pantry to stock its shelves with a larger variety of food, Perreault said. But the grant from the church expired in the spring, and the grant from the council will end on Dec. 31, leading CCS staff in recent months to discuss next steps for when the supplemental funding runs out.
“Rather than wait until there is no food on our shelves, try to make an operational change so that people can still get food once a week,” Perreault said.
As CCS reduces its food pantry access, staff are looking for new funding and supply sources wherever possible — writing grants to foundations, reaching out to local farmers and more. Perreault urged those who are able to donate any food or funds they can.
“We do not anticipate the need is going to decline,” Perreault said. “It’s been consistently going up in the last three years, and I think it’s going to get really a lot worse with everything that’s going on.”
She added: “We are very, very committed to keep our pantries open and take steps so that anybody who comes to us can leave with food.”
