At the end of every month, Michelle Smith stares into her cupboard and finds little food to be found.
With her monthly Social Security check spent, Smith turns to Community Emergency Service, the largest food shelf in Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood, one of the poorest areas in the Twin Cities. “They always have a good variety of food and it’s always fresh,” Smith said.
Smith, a former nursing assistant who was forced to quit work following an accident, is among many Minnesotans who are food insecure.
The ranks of the hungry are expected to grow as grocery prices remain high — and could go even higher — and the federal government has cut food stamps and other nutrition programs, including grants that help food shelves in the state. Moreover, the shutdown of the federal government has put the funding of food stamps, and other federal food programs, under threat.
For example, the Minnesota Department of Health said the state has only “several weeks” of funds for WIC, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children.
According to the USDA’s Household Food Security report for 2023, the latest available, 9.1% of Minnesota households — more than 207,000 households — are food insecure. That report, which tracks hunger across the United States, has been scrapped by the USDA recently.
“These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” the USDA said last month in announcing the end of the report, which many anti-hunger advocates say measured hunger too conservatively.
According to the last USDA hunger report, the level of food insecurity in Minnesota is lower than the national average, which is 12.3%. But the report indicated that hunger in Minnesota and across the nation is on the rise.
Minnesota’s 9.1% rate of food insecurity among households was based on a three-year average, from 2021-2023. The previous three-year average, from 2018-2020, indicated 7% of Minnesota households were food insecure.
And food insecurity is more prevalent in rural areas, where it was 16% in the 2021-2023 three-year average, and more than 25% in Black and Hispanic households.
The post-pandemic rise in hunger has been attributable to the end of expanded food stamp benefits, school lunches and other aid that was provided during the health crisis, and also to sharp spike in inflation afterward.
‘Your money goes fast’
Smith first visited the food shelf in the Phillips neighborhood 20 years ago, when she used to volunteer at the facility. Now she depends on it.
“When you're paying your light bill, your gas bill, your rent, your car insurance, your bus card, all this stuff and your household goods, you know, your hygiene stuff, your money goes fast,” Smith said.
So, by the end of the month, Smith needs the food provided by Community Emergency Service.
Billy Ortiz moved from Texas to the Twin Cities eight years ago and first visited Community Emergency Service in March of this year.
Ortiz has been unemployed for about a year. After his girlfriend died, Ortiz experienced homelessness and drug addiction. He said he is getting back on his feet, but still struggles with food insufficiency.
“There are times when I'm at home and there's nothing to eat, and I have no money to get something to eat,” Ortiz said. “Plus, with all the prices going up, you know, these days now it's hard to get food from the grocery store, so I come here, and this place has really helped me stay afloat.”
Ortiz also receives food stamps, which he says helps him make healthier food choices. He said the food shelf, which holds monthly cookouts to allow people to bond over shared experiences, makes him feel welcome and at home.
“I feel that they treat the people with the utmost respect,” he said.
Preserving dignity
The Community Emergency Service is run by Jamie Dolynchuk, a former Cargill executive who wanted to volunteer for a nonprofit so he could give back to the community.
He said he searched the internet for one that provides social services in the poorest section of the Twin Cities and came up with the food shelf.
Dolynchuk said the numbers clearly show that hunger in Minnesota is on the rise. Community Emergency Service once served 120-130 people a day. But when MinnPost interviewed him recently, that number had hit a high point – 460.
People reserve appointments to visit the food shelf online, but Dolynchuk said they never turn anyone away.
“A typical food shelf gives between 14 and 18 pounds of food for a visit, and most food shelves allow one visit per month,” Dolynchuk said. “CES gives about 40 pounds of food per visit, so like triple the amount, and we allow people to come twice a month.”
An innovation, the food shelf’s refrigerated food lockers, allow working moms to pick up groceries when they cannot make it to the food shelf before it closes. They simply scan a code on their phones and the locker with their order opens.
Community Emergency Service is also helping set up food lockers for students at the University of Minnesota, which Dolynchuk said are expected to be put into operation in February.
While food shelves typically buy their food, Dolynchuk said his operation has adopted a rescue food model. Instead of spending money buying groceries, they invested money in trucks to make daily trips to grocery stores that donate rescue food, especially fresh produce, which makes up about 85% of their supply.
“I think that there is a very big misconception that when you rescue food, it’s the throwaway garbage food from the grocery stores,” Dolynchuk said. “It is absolutely not. The food is fantastic.”
“These people here are good people,” Dolynchuk said. “They’re dealing with so many stresses and challenges in their life.”
Dolynchuk said Community Emergency Service is the most culturally diverse food shelf in Minnesota, with 161 languages and about 95% of the people identifying as people of color.
“Wherever there’s a conflict in the world, in about two or three months they’re gonna show up at my door,” he said.
The food shelf’s appointment system helps prevent frustration and long lines. The energy in the church is calm. People look through the refrigerators and shelves like they would at any grocery store, then weigh their food and go on their way.
Dolynchuk said preserving dignity is an important part of this operation.
A ‘hunger collapse’
Like many of the state’s food shelves, the Community Emergency Service receives some of its food from Second Harvest Heartland, a Brooklyn Park-based food bank that serves shelves in 41 Minnesota counties and 18 counties in western Wisconsin.
“We are already at record levels of hunger and things are getting worse,” said Zach Rodvold, director of public affairs at Second Harvest. “We are not able to meet additional demands.”
Second Harvest is funded by private donations and government help. But some of that help has been disrupted, or eliminated, by the Trump administration, which has also imposed tougher work requirements on food stamp recipients intended to result in lower enrollment.
Earlier this year, the administration froze shipments of food to the nation’s food banks from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), a core nutrition program that buys food from farmers and sends it to food pantries. Some of those shipments have been unfrozen, but the disruptions have caused harm and there’s uncertainty about the future of the program.
Rodvold said the program has provided about 4 million pounds of food to food shelves in the state each year.
Second Harvest has developed its own hunger census, which Rodvold said is more accurate — and alarming — than the national survey the USDA will no longer provide.
The latest survey, covering 2024, determined that one in five Minnesota households are food insecure and 26% of households with children are food insecure.
Rodvold had a dire warning.
"The potential of turning from a hunger crisis to a hunger collapse exists with food shelves,” Rodvold said.
Wren Warne-Jacobsen is a reporting intern with MinnPost.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
