For the past year, Jessica Putnam has volunteered at Crosswalk Community Outreach, a faith-based food pantry in Naples. She puts together boxes of food for seniors in the small community near Sebago Lake, and occasionally uses the pantry herself.
As someone who is disabled and has a limited income, Putnam relies on the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) to put food on the table each month. When the Trump administration decided to pause SNAP payments during the government shutdown, Putnam worried about what that would mean for herself and the nearly 170,000 other recipients in Maine.
As the fight over SNAP benefits played out in the courts, and federal guidance shifted, Maine chose to issue full benefits for November, and Putnam ultimately received hers on time last week. But the uncertainty “was very worrisome,” she said, and she was glad to know the pantry was there as backup.
Joanna Moore, a volunteer who helped found Crosswalk, said the pantry saw the number of people in need of food jump during the shutdown, from around 80 to 90 families to more than 100. Crosswalk can only do so much if the need continues to increase, she said.
Food pantries across Maine reported a surge in demand following the decision to freeze SNAP payments, which more than a tenth of people statewide rely on to buy groceries.
The uncertainty over the federal benefits was the latest development in a string of challenges that have stretched Maine’s food assistance programs thin this year, including more than $1 billion in federal funding cuts to programs that provide food to food banks and help states purchase food from local farmers and distribute it to hunger relief organizations.
Maine’s charitable food network consists of around 600 hunger relief organizations, including 250 pantries, that get free or low-cost food from Good Shepherd Food Bank, and largely rely on volunteers to operate. About a third of the food pantries are run out of churches or by other faith-based groups, according to Good Shepherd.
Jon Blanchard, director of hunger and relief services for Catholic Charities of Maine, oversees the organization’s food assistance program in Aroostook County, where one in five residents rely on SNAP benefits. Catholic Charities distributes up to 150,000 pounds of food per month to two dozen partner pantries across the county.
Federal funding cuts have resulted in smaller pallets of food from Good Shepherd, Blanchard said, though the impact varies from month to month.
A ProPublica analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture records found that cuts to the Emergency Food Assistance Program led to more than 4,000 canceled deliveries between May and September, equating to nearly 94 million pounds of food that would have gone to food banks across the country.
The ProPublica analysis identified roughly three dozen canceled shipments of meat, fruit, milk, eggs and cheese that would have been bound for Good Shepherd in Maine. This included 45,000 cartons of eggs, 88 tons of pork and more than 25,000 gallons of milk.
As Good Shepherd has seen reductions in federal support, the state Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry has worked to offset some of the impacts, said the food bank’s president Heather Paquette. Some “bonus trucks” of food delivered through a different federal program also helped, according to a representative from the department.
While federal cuts and the government shutdown stoked intense debates between Republicans and Democrats, Paquette called food assistance work “fiercely nonpartisan and blind to a lot of politics.”
She emphasized that Maine’s charitable food network is built on the assumption that low-income people have access to government assistance.
And though the shutdown has ended, challenges remain. States are bracing for an estimated $186 billion in cuts to federal nutrition assistance over the next decade through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration’s signature legislation, as well as more stringent work requirements for SNAP benefits, which could affect around 30,000 Mainers.
“We cannot food-bank and food-pantry our way out of not having a funded SNAP program in the state of Maine, or any state in the nation,” Paquette said.
She is currently advocating for two state bills that could help bolster nonprofit food assistance programs. L.D. 415 would double state support for Mainers Feeding Mainers, a program that allows Good Shepherd to buy food from local farmers, to $2 million per year. L.D. 468 would increase the funding for the Maine Nutrition Incentive Collaboration, which allows SNAP recipients to double their benefits when buying local produce at farmer’s markets.
Faith communities across the state also offer food assistance outside the traditional pantry model. St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Rockland relies on 11 teams to serve lunch every Saturday and Sunday. Linda Garson Smith coordinates the team from Adas Yoshuron Synagogue on the first Sunday of each month.
“Food is just so basic,” said Smith. “It’s just horrifying to see what’s happening and not to feel despair but for that to be an activating feeling.”
In Skowhegan, Free Street Church operates a mobile pantry. Pastor Paul King and his wife Patty King travel as far as Bangor and Portland to cook hundreds of cheeseburgers for homeless people each weekend.
Free Street, a member of the Maine Baptist Association, receives support for these efforts from as far away as Mississippi and California. If demand increases over the next decade because of cuts to government assistance, the pair have faith that they will be able to help.
“God’s going to provide the food,” Patty King said. “I don’t think it’s the government’s job to feed people. I think it’s our job.”
This story appears as part of a collaboration to strengthen investigative journalism in Maine between the BDN and The Maine Monitor. Read more about the partnership.
