NEDERLAND - I’ve written here about food insecurity in our community, and what we are doing as a community to deal with it.

As board chair for the Nederland Food Pantry & Clothing Closet (now “Peak Abundance” and the Peak to Peak Housing & Human Services Alliance—our “safety net”), I’m seeing the impact of chaos and cutbacks up close and personal, especially over the past eight days since we changed presidential administrations. 

As the Nederland Food Pantry, we’re now serving about 20% more households than before, and the struggles our clients are going through are more urgent, even frantic, than just a few months ago. The winter weather is part of it, but anyone who is watching the news from Washington is seeing chaos, callousness, and cruelty spread to the state and local level faster than we could have imagined.

Much of the food that we distribute from our Pantry comes from Community Food Share, a nonprofit which distributes over a million pounds of food in Boulder and Broomfield counties. Much of that comes from local groceries and wholesalers. And organizations like ours pick up what we can get once or twice a week to distribute to our community. Generally, that has most always included kitchen staples like milk, eggs, and bread, with very few interruptions. 

What we saw with today’s pickup was: no milk, no eggs, and a significantly lighter load than normal. We make up what we can with our fund-raised resources, but assuming you’ve been to the grocery store recently, you know what we are facing to keep hundreds of people in our community fed and healthy—and safe and warm.

As I write this, the fallout from last night’s presidential tweet is grim. Meals on Wheels funding has stopped. So has Medicaid funding (which provides health insurance to more than 80 million low-income and disabled Americans). No money for Head Start, early childhood education, or public health.

This follows significant cuts Boulder County announced in Q4 to safety net programs, which local safety net programs have not fully digested.

To our clients—we care deeply for you and your welfare, and we are doing everything we can to get you the food and assistance you need to keep your head above water.

To our wider community, we deeply appreciate your support, more now than ever. That includes your cash donations, your food and clothing gifts, and your volunteer time. 

The chaos coming out of Washington this week may be the new normal we will have to adjust to. It affects our human services safety net, and it has already impacted consumer sentiment—our willingness (and ability) to spend what it takes to keep an economy healthy and vibrant.

I hope and pray that inflationary trends we have set in motion do not put more of our community in harm's way….Food insecurity impacts about one in five of us in any given year, and we could be in for a rough ride in 2025.

Stay close, more news to follow. And by all means, if you would like to help, let’s talk.

(Editor’s note: A Federal judge temporarily halted the freeze on federal grants and loans late on January 28. But this will only last for a week, until the case can be heard in court.)