Feeding Tampa Bay sees 35% increase in need for food

Share

Feeding Tampa Bay has seen a 35% increase in Bay area residents who need help with food since before the pandemic. Last year, Feeding Tampa Bay served more than 95 million meals in an area that stretches from Hernando to Manatee County.

“We appreciate  that people pour their hearts out during the holiday season and care for those in need. But our neighbors are hungry every single day of the year and are food insecure,” Shannon Hannon Oliviero told MidPoint hosts Janet Scherberger and Rochelle Reback on Nov. 24. “We have a lot of people in our lines searching for food to put in our table.”

Covid 19, supply chain issues and rising food prices have all caused the spike in food insecurity that will likely take

It’s likely to take five years for those impacted by those turn of events to to recover, Feeding Tampa Bay CEO Tom Mantz told MidPoint.

“That seems like a long time but when you live marginally economically you end up taking on a significant amount of debt you end up in situations where you aren’t able to pay your bills,” he said. “Once people get behind it gets hard for them to dig out from under.”

You can listen to the entire interview here, or by searching for WMNF MidPoint wherever you listen to podcasts.

Leave a Reply

  • (will not be published)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

You may also like

student meal
Next school year Hillsborough public schools are offering free meals

Hillsborough Public Schools are offering students free meals for the...

Correspondence Through Poetry. A Mind-Numbing Week.

Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems by Herbert Gold...

The sound of change: Music’s influence on anti-war and human rights movements

Throughout history, music has served as a powerful catalyst for...

a man in a tye dye shirt talking on a radio microphone
Recreational pot for Florida is on the ballot this fall—let’s talk about it

In four months, Florida voters have the opportunity to vote...

Ways to listen

WMNF is listener-supported. That means we don't advertise like a commercial station, and we're not part of a university.

Ways to support

WMNF volunteers have fun providing a variety of needed services to keep your community radio station alive and kickin'.

Follow us on Instagram

Counterspin
Player position: