Not long before President Donald Trump signed the bill to reopen the federal government, Leeann Sheriff stopped in at the Denver Inner City Parish food pantry on Wednesday night to fill her cart with groceries for the next couple of weeks.
Normally, Sheriff would have been able to do her shopping at the grocery store with the benefits she receives from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). But with payments more than a month delayed, her EBT card was down to 59 cents.
“I've always had to struggle somehow,” Sheriff told CPR News.
DICP food pantry coordinator Graeson Jordan said the pantry saw traffic increase by 45 percent while SNAP benefits were paused. They also had to increase their hours and their stock of food.
“We have opened up our waitlist now for people who don't have reservations, because that demand has increased and we only have a certain amount of reservation slots per day,” Jordan said on Wednesday.
Less than an hour after Trump signed the funding bill, Colorado announced it would rush payments to the approximately 600,000 Coloradans who use the programs. The news was met with a major sigh of relief for many food pantries.
“Thank goodness,” said Nate Springer, President and CEO of Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado. “We just can't do our work without the most important programs — nutrition programs in the government that serve the most vulnerable population — being funded.”
The shutdown deal that passed Congress funds the U.S. Department of Agriculture through Sept. 30, 2026, and that includes money for SNAP and WIC, a nutrition program for women, infants, and children.
Feeding Colorado executive director Mandy Pullaro Nuku said, while she’s thrilled that SNAP benefits have returned, the pause was a major challenge for food banks that were already feeling strained.
“We're already at a heightened demand and doing the best we can to meet the need while recognizing it is often hard to do,” Pullaro Nuku said. “So adding in this delay in benefits and all of the uncertainty has caused quite a bit of chaos just for people experiencing hunger and who rely on those benefits.”
The state of Colorado did step in with some help during the SNAP pause, approving $10 million for Feeding Colorado, the umbrella association for five Feeding America affiliates in the state:
- Food Bank of the Rockies
- Food Bank for Larimer County
- Weld Food Bank,
- Community Food Share
- Care and Share for Southern Colorado
Those food banks partner with 1,300 organizations across Colorado, like pantries, shelters, schools and non-profits.
Five million dollars were distributed amongst food banks at the start of the month, but the second payment was cut to $2 million after federal funding resumed.
Even with that help, the organizations say, it wasn’t enough.
Community Food Share received $350,000 from the state allotment. But that didn’t go far for the Louisville-based food bank, which spends $750,000 per month on food purchases.
“We've spent all $350,000 of that, plus dipping into our own reserves to be able to pull out funding to meet that immediate need,” said Kristina Thomas, Director of Marketing and Communications at Community Share. “I know that the state gave some other large organizations funds directly, but we immediately purchased all of the food and began distributing that out to our 45 partner agencies.”
The Food Bank of the Rockies received a bigger chunk, at over $2.9 million.
“We have used every single dollar of that funding to purchase food, which is then going through our network of Hunger Relief Partners as well as our own mobile pantries,” said Erin Pulling, CEO of Food Bank of the Rockies. “Now, we've needed to staff up in order to meet this need. But, we're pulling those funds for our staffing and other needs from other organizational funds so that every dollar from the state is going to purchasing food products.”
The resumption of SNAP benefits comes just in time for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. But food pantries don’t expect traffic to ease up anytime soon. And due to the uncertainty surrounding the benefits, some food banks started to make adjustments to their holiday plans.
The Weld Food Bank partnered with local nonprofit agencies to collect turkeys and fixings to provide holiday baskets. The organization is hoping to get 6,000 turkeys by the end of next week or right before Thanksgiving.
“We were also already purchasing additional food to address the increase in folks coming to us, and we continue to plan to do that through November,” said Weston Edmunds, Director of Marketing and Communications at the Weld Food Bank. “We want to make sure that as folks are getting their SNAP back — but they're still trying to just get themselves resettled and feeling like they're okay — that if they need to come to the food bank, they can. And we want to make sure we have the food available for them when they do.”
