Under a tent on the Capitol grounds, a food bank staffer poured out a box of lemons into another container in front of her colleagues. They packed the fruit into green, net bags that will go to local families.
“You’ve got to have your Girl Scout or Boy Scout skills to be able to pack these bags,” Maria Houlne, the Vice President of Supply Chain at the California Association of Food Banks, said.
She and other food bank leaders gathered at the state Capitol in Sacramento on Tuesday to talk with lawmakers about funding cuts that threaten to reduce food for families in need.
In particular, they’re advocating for CalFood — a state program that gives food banks money to buy local.
Kevin Buffalino is a spokesperson for the Sacramento Food Bank.
“We spent about 95% of our CalFood funding on produce,” Buffalino said. “So, not only is that healthy, culturally relevant product that we're able to distribute into our community, but it goes back to supporting local California farmers,”
CalFood has received about $60 million each year since 2022, but Newsom is proposing reducing that to its baseline funding of $8 million.
“I would say that food banks today are facing kind of a perfect storm of issues,” added Becky Silva, a spokesperson with the California Association of Food Banks.
“Congress is also, as we speak, negotiating and considering cuts to the SNAP program or CalFresh, the biggest cuts that the program would ever face,” Silva said.
The federal government could soon require states like California to pay billions of dollars for the food assistance program, which is unprecedented.
And the United States Department of Agriculture recently announced about a billion dollars in food assistance cuts nationwide.
Newsom is also proposing a new diaper subsidy program in his budget. That’s despite criticism from food bank leaders and the Legislative Analyst’s Office who say it’ll be less effective than existing diaper bank programs.
The new program would put about $7.4 million this year towards 3 months of free diapers for all babies born in California, regardless of household income. That amount would grow to $12.5 million next year.
But there’s no money for California’s established diaper banks, which help households with low incomes — even though those banks received $9 million last year.
Mark Lowry heads the Orange County Food Bank and diaper bank and said the system already reaches 83% of Californians.
“We're suggesting to the governor and to the legislature that it's a priority to support and sustain what they've already invested in establishing, rather than abandon that and try to start something new and unproven,” he said.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office said the new program would likely be less effective since it would distribute a smaller number of diapers and include families who don’t need assistance.
The Newsom administration said it plans to eventually use the CalRx model to make inexpensive diapers available in the state.
CalRx is a state project to provide low-cost medications. It currently distributes Naloxone — an overdose reversal drug — widely, but is over a year behind in its plan to make its own version of insulin available.
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