Geoff Rushing, founder of City of Refuge Athens, said Northeast Georgia has gone from “food insecurity crisis to food insecurity emergency.”
On Nov. 1, for the first time in United States history, the federal government suspended benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program amid the federal government shutdown. The unprecedented cut left thousands of Athens-Clarke County families without the support they rely on to buy groceries, and local nonprofits scrambling to meet demand they had never experienced.
According to the Athens Wellbeing Project, 17% of Athens-Clarke County residents rely on SNAP to afford their groceries. Without those benefits, keeping food on the table became an immediate struggle.
Organizations like City of Refuge Athens have been overwhelmed by the level of need. On. Nov. 12, Rushing said he arrived at 6:30 a.m. to begin setting up for their morning distribution and found seven cars already lined up, three and a half hours before the scheduled start time.
Every Wednesday, the nonprofit distributes groceries donated from grocery stores and food banks. Typically, the organization serves around 230 to 250 people, but in the past two weeks, the numbers have jumped.
It’s crazy. We are going to serve well over 300 families this morning,” Rushing said at the Nov. 12 distribution.
The impact extends beyond a single day of distributions. City of Refuge Athens manages the Food for Kids program in Athens-Clarke and Madison County schools, where demand for weekend bags and grocery boxes has also risen.
“We’ve seen requests [from school social workers] at about a 20% to 23% increase, which is significant for us,” Rushing said. “The numbers last week for kids’ bags went up by a little over 200 bags. This week it was about another 100.”
Other nonprofits are experiencing similar trends. Mercy Health Center, a clinic serving uninsured patients living below the poverty line, has seen a spike in demand at its Mercy Market, where patients can pick up grocery staples with no questions asked.
“Most of the patients that we’re seeing are saying, ‘Hey, can I stop by the market?’ And that was not necessarily true before this month,” said Cole Phillips, the clinic’s CEO and Medical Director. “I would estimate more than half of our patients are on some form of SNAP benefits.”
SNAP benefits were a crucial tool for many managing chronic conditions such as diabetes by ensuring access to fresh, preventive foods. Without that support, health advocates fear long-term consequences.
“I think that there are going to be long-term health outcomes that are experienced because of the shutdown,” said Abigail Darwin, director of programs at Wholesome Wave Georgia. “Not only are they creating unhealthy bodies, but there’s missed opportunities when you’re not feeding a child nutritious food at home.”
For City of Refuge, the crisis became personal last week. Rushing described a moment when a community member came on a non-distribution day begging for food. The woman discovered that an elderly neighbor raising her eight-year-old granddaughter was completely out of groceries after losing SNAP benefits.
That was like heartbreak for us,” Rushing said.
“To know that if that neighbor had not went and checked, that eight-year-old daughter could have come home from school that day after having free breakfast and free lunch, and grandma would have had nothing to cook for her for dinner.”
Rushing said what worries him most is that this is not an isolated incident. With SNAP payout timelines still uncertain, he anticipates that the high demand will continue into the end of the year.
“We feel like the need is still going to be there through the holidays,” he said. “It’s tough that this has happened, but we feel like it’s doubly tough that it happened during the holiday season. Because families are trying to gear up for Christmas, and now they’re struggling just to make sure they have food in the home for their families.”
The federal government shutdown has officially ended, but its economic impact is expected to linger. Athens families and local nonprofits are still waiting for the full SNAP payments owed for November. The unprecedented benefit lapse intensified hardships for already food-insecure community members, and local nonprofits are preparing for continued demand as they support the community through the economic fallout.
Eva Duignan is a journalism major in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
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