Central Texas Food Bank employees at work (Photo by John Anderson)
Food insecurity is on the rise in Travis County, and the number of Austin and surrounding area residents who can barely afford food is expected to continue to rise in the coming years unless local or federal governments take action.
“When there are particularly affluent areas in metropolitan areas, there are also major areas of need – and Travis County is no exception,” said Sari Vatske, president and CEO of the Central Texas Food Bank. “So we have seen unprecedented levels of food insecurity, with the highest rate since 2014 and the largest one-year increase since 2008.”
The numbers are striking: Texas has the second-highest food insecurity rate in the country, and the Austin area is no exception. According to a May report from Feeding America, about 187,000 people in Travis County were food insecure last year—a number that the Central Texas Food Bank estimates will rise to 208,000 people this year, affecting one in five children. The food bank currently projects another 14% increase in food insecurity over the next three to five years.
Given these challenges, as well as the difficulty of keeping food banks supplied with sufficient supplies in the face of rising food prices, the food bank launched a new partnership last Wednesday with nonprofit Workforce Solutions Capital Area to provide comprehensive services that Vatske said are designed to “address the root causes of food insecurity and poverty.”
“If there is one thing we know, it is that needs do not exist in isolation.” – Sari Vatske of the Central Texas Food Bank
At an Austin Area Research Organization conference in December, Workforce Solutions CEO Tamara Atkinson told Vatske that her organization would be moving out of its building and looking for a new location. Within months, the two organizations were nearing an agreement to consolidate their services under one roof at the food bank’s headquarters on Montopolis Drive in southeast Austin. For the food bank, which has long sought to provide or facilitate comprehensive services such as cooking and warehouse training programs for its clients, connecting with an organization like Workforce Solutions made sense to address food insecurity.
“If there’s one thing we know, it’s that needs don’t exist in isolation,” Vatske said. “Often, food insecurity is the result of a larger systemic breakdown.”
The partnership also makes sense for Workforce Solutions, which is committed to workforce development in the Austin area: Many of Workforce Solutions’ clients also struggle with varying degrees of food insecurity, and the fact that the organization is located in the same building as the food bank may make it much easier for its clients to access services from both organizations.
“Food insecurity can be a significant barrier to finding work, and access to food is one of the most requested forms of assistance we receive at Workforce Solutions Capital Area,” Atkinson wrote in a statement to the timeline.
Vatske said many factors are playing a role in the rise in local food insecurity, including the increased cost of living, which is pushing people out of urban areas with reliable public transit and nearby grocery stores.
“We see that even in Del Valle,” Vatske said. “People may have transportation, but there may be more than six people living in the house – and so the person who needs the car to get to work is not the same person who does the grocery shopping. So there are just a lot of factors at play, and we don’t have an interconnected public transit system that can get people from Pflugerville or Round Rock or even further south, like Kyle or Buda, to Austin where there are jobs.”
Even though inflation has made food more expensive, public transportation is a major problem. While Austin plans to significantly expand its public transportation system in the coming years, the expansion of the regional transit network is progressing slowly.
“At the local level, we need to make sure our elected officials are looking at things like transportation and area connections and working with developers to make sure they are considering retail when they want to increase the population in certain areas,” Vatske said.
To reverse that trend, the region will likely have to confront some of its most intractable problems. But it also needs help from the federal government. Vatske said it’s critical that Congress pass a new farm bill that fully funds the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which provides food to food banks across the country, as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). The version of the bill introduced by the House in the spring would cut the program by about $30 billion over the next decade, which could have a devastating impact on thousands of families in the state.
“If these numbers are any indication this year, especially given the expiration of pandemic-level benefits and depending on what happens in the farm bill regarding USDA funding for food insecurity programs, we continue to expect food insecurity to increase,” Vatske said.
