Joeniece Jackson surveys food available at the Elver Park Neighborhood Center food pantry on Tuesday, Nov. 25. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

The Elver Park Neighborhood Center on the far southwest side of Madison has long been a familiar and welcome source of help for Joeniece Jackson and her four children.

Her oldest, now 14, attended the center’s after-school programs from an early age, as have her other three kids. And Joeniece says she’s enjoyed volunteering as well, or bringing the children of friends who may need child care unexpectedly.

But in the last few years, the center has served another purpose as well — as a food pantry for families who need to stretch their family meal budgets.

“The food pantry has gotten us through some of our hard times,” Jackson says.

The Elver Park after-school program isn’t the only one doing double duty. Across Wisconsin, other after-school programs have added food pantry services to their offerings for families who may not be able to afford to keep their cupboards full.

“After-school programs have long been doing after-school meals and snacks for kids,” says Daniel Gage of the Wisconsin Out of School Time Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of after-school programs. Food pantry programs are a newer addition to that work. “After-school programs tend to be a place where people come together as parents are coming to pick up their kids.”

The recent federal shutdown, when federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Payments were halted Nov. 1, exacerbated the need. With the shutdown finished and SNAP funds flowing again, that has eased off, but only slightly.

The Elver Park Neighborhood Center and its after-school program are run by the Wisconsin Youth Company. The agency operates two neighborhood centers in Madison along with school-based after-school programs in Dane County and  Waukesha County.

Elver Park’s food pantry began operating during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools were closed and, for a time, the center’s after-school programs were on hold as well, according to Takela Harper, the assistant director of centers for Wisconsin Youth Company.

Originally the center partnered with the Madison Metropolitan School District to deliver food to school district families who needed it, Harper said. When schools and after-school programs reopened, the program converted to a store-style food pantry, where families come on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pick up donations of packaged as well as fresh foods.

At Elver Park, there’s been “a consistent flow” in traffic for the last couple of years, Harper says. But that doubled in October from the previous month, with about 30 to 50 families a week coming in for assistance.

In Nekoosa, located in Wood County in North Central Wisconsin, the Nekoosa School District launched a food pantry a year ago. The city has a population of about 2,500 and the school district an enrollment of just over 1,200.

Nikki Stearns organized the Nekoosa program while serving in Americorps with the local YMCA. Her Americorps assignment had her working with elementary school-age children, and she soon learned the extent of hunger in some of those kids.

“So many of my kids are hungry,” Stearns said. “I started bringing in snacks, and other teachers started bringing in snacks for students, too.”

A 2023 United Way report on ALICE families in the community — families on the edge and vulnerable to falling into poverty — documented how pervasive families are who cannot count on regular meals or an adequate supply of food .  

“In Nekoosa, 53% of our community is either living in poverty or one paycheck away,” Stearns says.

In the Nekoosa program, families who sign up receive a box of food each month. Some are also enrolled in FoodShare — Wisconsin’s name for the state’s SNAP benefits program. When SNAP payments stopped Nov. 1, however, the food pantry’s signups shot up.

Through September and October, the Nekoosa program served 38 people — eight to 10 families, Stearns said. That jumped to more than 50 in November after SNAP benefits stopped.

“The first day when SNAP benefits weren’t uploaded to people’s [electronic benefits] cards, I think I had 35 applications come in in one day,” Stearns said.
“Now we’re serving about 200 people.” Even with the resumption of SNAP after the end of the shutdown, the demand has not diminished significantly, she added.

The Nekoosa food pantry program had been housed with the YMCA after-school program, based at a middle school. In June, the school transferred the food pantry program to the operation of the YMCA, which moved it to share space with the Y’s child care program, where recipients pick up their monthly boxes of food.

Providing a monthly allotment of food proved to be the most practical way for the Nekoosa program to operate, Stearns said, because “I don’t always know what [food] donations we’ll get or how much funding we’ll have to support people.”

The Nekoosa program was launched as part of a Wisconsin Partnership Program grant that the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health made to the Marshfield Clinic. With the $500,000 grant, the clinic was able to fund seven projects across the state’s northern half to address food insecurity.

“When students are fed and have those basic needs met, with food as one of those basic needs, they certainly can learn and focus so much more,” says Jill Niemczyk, a health educator with the Marshfield Clinic’s Center for Community Health Advancement who has been coordinating the program.

Other projects included a food pantry expansion, a teen meal program, gardening projects and a variety of nutrition education and community engagement programs.

“Each one of our seven sites is doing something a little bit different,” Niemczyk says.

The grant is now in its second year. In the third and final year, she says, attention will turn to assisting the various recipients as they look at how to establish ongoing community support and build on what they have been doing.

Even with SNAP benefits restored with temporary legislation to fund the federal government through January, Stearns expects the need to address hunger and food insecurity to persist.

“I think a lot of people are feeling like the food crisis is addressed” because the shutdown ended, Stearns says. “But a lot of us in food security are nervous about January. There’s a pretty big need to focus on people being fed — students are going to school hungry, whether there’s FoodShare or not.”

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After a recent government study found that Native people are more than twice as likely to deal with food shortages and lack of nutritional meals than all U.S. households combined, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) made six recommendations to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) aiming to improve food security. But a year later, the USDA, which agreed with the recommendations, has yet to act on them. 

In July 2024, the GAO issued the recommendations in a report outlining opportunities the USDA could take to address challenges in federal nutrition programs. The report also asked Congress to consider “addressing in statute” the role of tribes in administering federal nutrition programs. 

Barriers to food security vary from tribe to tribe, but commonalities exist, according to GAO director Kathryn Larin. In many cases the rural locations of tribal communities make access to a variety of nutritious foods difficult. “And the costs of the foods are higher than in more urban areas, partly due to transportation costs or other factors,” Larin told Buffalo’s Fire.

Those challenges have led to significant health disparities, including higher rates of diabetes and obesity among Indigenous people. 

The way food is distributed and administered in tribal communities may be contributing to the problem.

After interviewing tribes and tribal organizations in seven states, as well as state and USDA officials, the GAO asked Congress to consider requiring states to consult with tribes when carrying out federal nutrition programs on reservations and in Native neighborhoods. Lawmakers have yet to address the matter.

Currently, tribes can administer several programs, including Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations (FDPIR),  Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), if it’s determined that the state isn’t able to do so effectively.

In some cases, state programs or administrators are required to consult with tribes. “In other instances,” Larin said, “there’s no clear direction as to what the tribal role is. So we’ve asked that Congress address that explicitly.”

Some tribes told the GAO that their members were more likely to participate in programs the tribes administered, which tend to be located on reservations. Non-tribal programs are often off the reservation, which creates an additional burden of traveling.  

“We know people are falling through the cracks,” said Mary Greene Trottier, a Spirit Lake member who serves as the director of its food distribution program and the National Association of Food Delivery Program on Indian Reservations. 

Trottier says her people are struggling with diet, good nutrition and proper access to health services, and she estimates that 60-70% of schools on the Spirit Lake reservation have students in the free lunch program. 

“We know the problems,” said Trottier, on the findings of the GAO study. “We know we can address the solutions.” She said tribal leaders and program directors are “boots on the ground” who just need to be heard and have their knowledge applied to improving food issues in tribal communities. “We know how to run our programs. We know what works, what doesn’t work.” 

Letting tribes take the lead

Like Trottier, Marlon Skendandore is a proponent for having tribes administer more food programs. He sees it as a move toward food sovereignty. 

Before being elected as an Oneida tribal councilor, Skendandore worked as a food pantry manager for the tribe for six years, helping members across Wisconsin get fed “without red tape.” One of the GAO recommendations — that the USDA work to avoid dual participation in both the Food Distribution Program and SNAP and help qualified applicants get enrolled in a timely fashion — addresses what he sees as a “weird caveat” in the current system.

“Say you were on SNAP low income (and) you start building yourself up,” said Skenandore, describing how some SNAP recipients get work or otherwise improve their earnings. “You’re no longer income eligible.” He added there’s then a waiting period of 30 days before someone leaving SNAP can apply for the Food Distribution program. “I don’t know what the sense of 30 days of waiting is because they’re being administered by two totally different departments.”  

The GAO has recommended that Food and Nutrition Service administrators study how switching from one program to another affects food security and then share that information with Congress. 

Skenandore says both nutritious-food access and affordability are issues affecting the Oneida. Besides his work with the food pantry, he launched the Tribal Elder Food Box Program during the COVID-19 pandemic to alleviate food insecurity among Wisconsin tribes.

“We’re now up to making 2,400 boxes every couple of weeks,” he said.

Skenandore said that earlier this year funding cuts to the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program made the Tribal Elder Food Box Program’s future look bleak. But the program has since secured $3 million in state funding, which will allow it to continue for another two years. 

The GAO also recommended that the USDA include national data on Native food security in an annual report and discontinue visual observation as a way to determine race and ethnicity for the Food Distribution Program on reservations. Finally, the GAO wants the agriculture secretary to identify and rectify gaps in outreach to tribal communities and make administering these programs more flexible in ways that support food security. 

The USDA told Buffalo’s Fire in an email that it’s “working diligently” to address the GAO’s recommendations. But when asked about the timeline for implementing them, the press office did not provide one.

In a separate email, the USDA said the department and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins are “committed to working with states, tribes, territories, and local government partners” to improve and modernize their programs, while “upholding our responsibility to program participants and American taxpayers.”

“The bottom line is that we feel strongly that the recommendations we made are key to addressing the issue of food insecurity in tribal communities,” the GAO’s Larin said, adding, “That’s why we’re committed to following up with the agency and hopefully encouraging them to implement the recommendations.”

The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and the House Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.

Self-education

In the meantime, both Trottier and Skenandore say there’s much to teach their respective communities about proper nutrition and health. This means adapting more traditional foods into their diet and scaling back fast food and ultra-processed items that either lack nutritional value or add to health problems. And with some traditional staples like wild rice and berries getting expensive, focusing on community gardens is seen as a way to help offset some of the issues. 

“We have little kids that we’re really trying to instill with gardening and nutrition knowledge so they make better choices,” said Trottier. “We might not be able to change the older generation, but we’ve got a start with the younger generation. There’s always new hope to be found.”

This story was originally published by Buffalo’s Fire.

References

United States Government Accountability Office. (July 2024). Tribal Food Security

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health website

‘People are falling through the cracks’: Congress and USDA have not acted on recommendations to alleviate food insecurity among tribes is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.