It’s 8:30 on a Friday morning and the Alameda Food Bank (AFB) Island Community Market doesn’t open for another two hours. Volunteers are loading food donations into the warehouse. Outside, clients who are mostly senior citizens, are chatting in small groups and waiting to shop.
Inside the warehouse is AFB Executive Director Teale Harden. She sat down with the Alameda Post to talk about the ways in which the Food Bank is being affected by the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill. The bill is President Trump’s signature policy act which, among other actions, makes drastic cuts in federal funding for food stamps and aid.
The bill’s immediate impact on AFB and other food banks around the country is that it reduces federal grants and food given to aid organizations. AFB recently had a federal grant rescinded and has felt the effects of cuts to the USDA’s The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which distributes food.
“We have seen a decrease in the amount of food that we’re receiving from those programs,” Harden tells the Post. The Food Bank has already “made programmatic changes to try to make sure that we are sourcing enough food” and is actively fundraising to “fill that void,” Harden explains.
On the client side, food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or CalFresh in the state of California, are being cut. According to some estimates, 22.3 million families will lose some or all of their SNAP benefits due to changes in work requirements and eligibility based on legal status…