CINCINNATI — On Tuesday afternoon, families were filling up their shopping carts at the Freestore Foodbank in Riverside just minutes before a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump Administration's freeze on federal grants and loans.
The nonprofit posted a message on its website earlier in the day saying in part, starting Feb. 3, "due to changes in federal regulations, food items per household are now limited."
About 250,000 people across the Tri-State rely on the Freestore Foodbank annually. Its Riverside location served 47 million meals last year and has the capacity to serve 100 million. The food bank has 615 food pantries across 20 counties, with 13% of its annual budget coming from federal reimbursement.
Now, CEO Kurt Reiber and his staff are forced to think about contingency plans if its federal reimbursement goes away.
"How do we use the reserves that we have in place?" Reiber asked. "Most of those families only have about $200 at the end of the month, so when a car breaks down, or a child gets sick, they're coming to our Freestore Foodbank pantries, our markets and our entire network supports them."
Hear what he had to say below:
Freestore Foodbank is part of the Feeding America program, which Reiber said provided six billion pounds of food last year alone. The markets and pantries have canned goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy and personal care items like diapers.
"I was at a local hospital today doing some work and their initial reaction was we're going to have to let go of a lot of people," said Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Cincinnati.
Landsman called the Trump Administration's order Tuesday "chaos."
"It is law that they were supposed to put this money into our communities — it's our money," said Landsman. "It's not legal, the constitution is very clear about what Congress does and what the president can and can't do. This is them pillaging and stealing from folks in order to pay for unnecessary spending on tax giveaways for the super-wealthy."
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Kim Webb, executive director of Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky, said while their facility is not directly impacted by this order from the Trump Administration, some of their community partners may be impacted. If their community partners lose federal assistance, the facility could also see a rise in demand, which has already been at capacity for January.
"They're already focused on where am I going to sleep tonight so I'm not sure there's a capacity to think about long-term of anything," said Webb.
While federal funds remain up in the air, Freestore Foodbank said it can always use help in the form of monetary donations or volunteers helping them at one of its locations.
