Lorrice Grant, executive director at Loaves and Fishes (in red) with some of Saturday's volunteers. Lucy Gellman Photo.
Lorrice Grant stood beside two vacant chest freezers, taking stock of a root cellar that felt much emptier than usual. In the corner, volunteers buzzed around a tower of discarded cardboard boxes, continually in motion. Just outside the door, voices rose and fell, a tapestry of English, Spanish and Pashto. Beside a mural of saints, a line stretched through the basement of St. Paul & St. James Episcopal Church.
Grant, who had already announced that there was not enough meat for the 500 people expected that morning, took a breath. Then she looked ahead, and walked straight on to the next room.
Grant is the executive director at Loaves and Fishes, a food pantry and free clothing boutique at the edge of New Haven’s Wooster Square neighborhood. This month, she—like other emergency food providers across the city, state and country—is dealing with a cut in federal funding that has left sites scrambling, often unable to serve their community at the expected capacity and volume. Already, she’s worried about the people who will fall through the cracks.
“It’s like if you’re having a dinner party for all your favorite friends and treasured guests, because that’s how we think of the people who come through our pantry,” Grant said on Saturday, her red vest like a searchlight in the crowded space. “And usually you have wonderful food for them, they’re all excited to come. But now, you don’t have all those things. And you know they’re still coming, and there’s no way to tell them not to come because you don’t have enough.”
It’s like a shock to the system that keeps coming, she added. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump axed $800,000 in federal funding to the Connecticut Foodshare, a statewide food distributor that serves over 600 partner organizations across the state. Those dollars are part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Local Food Purchase Assistance program and, until this month, comprised one fifth of Connecticut Foodshare’s overall grocery budget.
Food pantries are already feeling the ripple effects, Grant said. On a normal Saturday—at least, normal prior to March—Loaves and Fishes has between 8,000 and 10,000 pounds of food to distribute, including fresh eggs, milk and yogurt, bread, rice and beans, meat or poultry, fruit and vegetables and canned goods. Normally, that serves hundreds of hungry people, with a line that starts on Chapel Street before seven in the morning, even in the depths of winter.
But since earlier this month, the pantry’s overall haul has been smaller, with key products—meat and eggs especially—especially affected by the strain of federal funding cuts, soaring food prices and bird flu. Saturday, volunteers found themselves with 6,000 pounds of food, between 60 and 75 percent of what they normally have. Eggs, which they once gave out by the dozen, are now portioned into packs of six (a month ago, Grant found herself debating how to buy 33 cases of eggs, which feeds about 300 guests, for $4,600).
Staff started the day with an announcement, given in both English and Spanish, that there was only enough meat for about 100 people. Grant recalled the pain of asking guests who could go without to do so, she said. By the time the pantry closed after 11 a.m., she expected that over 500 people, some feeding young kids and large families, would have used its services. Saturday’s numbers were closer to 360, she later wrote in an emergency appeal email Saturday night.
Since stepping into her role in 2023, “I’ve never seen the distribution this low,” she said. The work comes as both grocery prices and food insecurity rise among city residents, both at a rate that feels alarming and unprecedented. Last year, a report on the State of Hunger in New Haven found that 27 percent of New Haveners report experiencing food insecurity. Of that number, 39 percent have one or more child. Even before funding cuts hit food banks, people were going hungry.
“We see how deep the need is,” Grant continued, walking from the basement’s large, open room to a free clothing “boutique” one room over. Inside, a few women looked gingerly through racks of cotton, denim and polyester. “Guests come to you with hope and expectation, and now you have less than you normally have. It’s a very heavy feeling.”
But Grant, a petite woman with tight curls, wire-rimmed frames and cushioned sneakers that have logged a few thousand steps by 8 a.m., is also not one to be easily deterred. This month, the pantry launched a new partnership with Midwest Food Bank, a national food distributor that runs its Connecticut operation out of Manchester. Working closely with Yale University’s Neighborhood Health Project (NHP), Loaves and Fishes also provides free blood pressure and blood glucose level screenings, emergency contraceptives, diapers, hygiene products like tampons and menstrual cups, and flu and Covid vaccine clinics in the fall.
And then there are the volunteers, a small, benevolent army that springs into action each weekend. By dawn on Saturday, Grant knew to expect folks from around the region, from Orange’s first selectman to catechism students from Madison (St. Margaret’s Church sends people every week) to seniors from Common Ground High School, where students and staff are grappling with a federal funding cut of their own.
Saturday, that vision was in full force. Volunteers, many of whom have relied on Loves and Fishes in the past, walked around with sticky white nametags, each blue and yellow borders at the edges. At one station, Knights of Pythias members Mitchell Goldblatt and John Kelman handed out tomatoes and Brussels Sprouts, left after a morning rush on cabbage and bell peppers.
As she made her way to a clothing staging area, Grant beamed at Sally Fleming, a member of the board of directors who has been with the nonprofit since its inception in the 1980s. Fleming, who can still remember when the clothing closet was upstairs, held up a cream-colored silk blouse and smiled.
“Look at this snazzy thing!” she exclaimed. Grant’s eyes twinkled.
“We’re going dancing!” she responded. Rather than a community closet, she likes to call the space a boutique, because “we want people to be able to shop with dignity.”
In part, Grant does the work because she’s lived it herself. Born and raised in New Haven, Grant lost her mom when she was just a teenager, around the time she became a mother herself. Out of necessity, she learned to stretch what resources she had, to turn $5 into a week of grilled cheese sandwiches, cereal with milk, and boiled potatoes. Since that time, she’s worked for Connecticut WIC, the Food Bank for New York City, and most recently Haven’s Harvest, giving back to the community that raised her.
Rodney P. has a first-year medical student (she asked not to be named) take his blood pressure.
“We gotta get creative when we don’t have enough,” she said. Her own past has also made her acutely aware of how profound the need is, in and well beyond New Haven. Most weeks, she said, she will see multiple families carpool to the pantry for food, using a single vehicle. “I have to believe that this will turn around, that we as a community can rally, that we can take care of our neighbors. The worst thing is for someone to come here and not get what they need.”
As she made her way through the church’s basement, it was easy to see why people love the space she has nurtured—and why she loves them back. Rocking a sweatshirt for the Pittsburgh Steelers, weekly guest Rodney P. praised Loaves and Fishes’ role in the community, where he’s able to supplement his weekly grocery shopping trips with food that gets him through the week.
“It really alleviates some of the burden,” he said, taking a package of soft dinner rolls from a table piled with bags of sliced bread. A retired electrician and veteran in New Haven, Rodney can already feel the economic squeeze of inflation, particularly on groceries for him and his family. Loaves and Fishes stands out to him as “one of the best places” because of its commitment to fresh food, particularly items like milk and eggs.
Asked what he plans to make with Saturday’s haul, he burst into a smile.
“I’m a master cook!” he said. While in the U.S. Navy, Rodney cooked for up to 200 men, he said. Saturday’s groceries would become dazzling dishes at his dinner table. On his way out into the bright morning, he stopped at the NHP for a blood pressure reading. In the seat next to him, a fellow New Havener was describing his struggles to get reliable diabetes medication, while a glucose reading finished tabulating on a tiny screen.
Grant with Common Ground High School students Jayda Adamo and Lillian Bethke.
That kind of community care—even in a time of increasing hardship—is what Grant hopes to see more of. In addition to its Saturday morning pantry, Loaves and Fishes makes deliveries to the Department of Veterans Affairs (another victim of federal funding cuts) and Agency on Aging. She knows that there are seniors, interfaith caregivers, and veterans counting on those deliveries, and has no intention of stopping even as things get tight.
“It’s so hard when you know you don’t have enough,” she said, making a mental calculation of what food groups were missing when meat and dairy became harder to secure.
She added that Loaves and Fishes leans heavily on the community: the organization is hoping to raise $40,000 of its $300,000 operating budget during the Great Give, scheduled for May 7 through 8. That money will help support weekly food distribution efforts.
Rodney: It helps alleviate the burden.
“Our budget is not set up to purchase enough food to totally fund a weekly distribution of 400 people,” she added in an emergency appeal Saturday night. “We operate very lean and use wisdom with every monetary gift given. Today I ask if you can help with even $25.00 to contribute to five bags of food?”
“We understand that we are all experiencing some shifts and changes. We have pulled together before to support our community and we need you now while our partners contend with these unforeseen sudden changes in financial support. Please support our community.”
Donate to Loaves and Fishes here.