Top: Lorrice Grant and CFAN members at Wednesday's hearing. Bottom: Kim Hart.
The first thing Kim Hart put back was the carton of five dozen eggs.
Then she put back the cheese. Then the breakfast cereal.
Then she looked at the register and did the math, to see if her monthly SNAP benefits would cover the rest.
Hart, a longtime member of Witnesses To Hunger New Haven, told that story Wednesday night, as over two dozen people turned out to City Hall to testify on behalf of New Haven’s Coordinated Food Access Network (CFAN), at the final budget hearing of the season. In almost two hours of testimony, speaker after speaker urged members of the New Haven Board of Alders’ Finance Committee to reinstate the nearly $500,000 that the city allocated to CFAN last year—instead of the $0 that it would receive in Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed $733.3 million city budget.
Last year, a total of $482,439 in funding emerged after a similar push from advocates, from food pantry staff and volunteers to faith leaders to people experiencing hunger themselves. At the time, those dollars represented a combination of the city’s general fund and federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) dollars.
This year, the call for emergency funding comes as hunger continues to rise in New Haven and across Connecticut, and guidelines around federal initiatives like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and WIC (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children) keep changing.
Founding CFAN partners include the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK), Loaves & Fishes, Witnesses To Hunger, and the Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE). It currently comprises 33 partners, including both organizations and individuals, according to CARE Director Alycia Santilli.
“I had to put stuff back because the prices have increased so much. Embarrassing, right?” Hart said of a recent trip to the grocery store, becoming emotional as she spoke about her own journey with food insecurity. “In the month of April, I’ve ended up hitting food pantries three times this month, already, to supplement me and my son’s groceries. Please fund CFAN. Food is a right. Food is necessary, it’s necessary, in order to survive. You can’t survive without it.”
CARE Director Alycia Santilli, who spoke about the work that CFAN has been able to accomplish with $482,439 in city funding from the 2025-26 budget.
Her story has become one that is alarmingly common in New Haven, where 24 percent of city residents reported food insecurity last year, according to CARE’s annual “State of Hunger in New Haven” report (read it here). In the past year, as the Trump Administration has frozen, reinstated, and continued to change eligibility requirements around SNAP benefits, emergency food distribution sites have found themselves scrambling to serve more people, often with fewer financial resources and less state and federal support themselves.
In part, that’s because food insecurity is part of a wider federal attack, or series of attacks, on immigrants, poor people, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, mothers, and the working class. People who identify as queer, who don’t have access to higher education, who are supporting dependents, are unhoused or housing insecure, or are living at or beneath the poverty line (despite often working multiple jobs) are all more likely to be hungry—as are their kids and their families.
As food prices rise, wages also haven’t kept up, meaning that many New Haveners are working longer hours and still have less money to spend on basic necessities like food, housing, and electricity. Even within that equation, there’s a delicate dance: people might pick up an extra shift or job to survive, and then learn that they make too much to qualify for benefits—while still not being able to make ends meet.
At CitySeed, for instance, Agriculture Programs Manager Blaise Berglund said that staff have seen a 300 percent increase in people using the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, which doubles the value of food stamps to allow SNAP and WIC recipients to buy fresh, locally-grown produce at markets like the ones CitySeed runs each Saturday at Conte West Hills Magnet School.
Grant: Restore funding so that CFAN can keep feeding people.
Lorrice Grant, the executive director of Loaves & Fishes, remembered walking into work on March 1, and hoping that the pantry had enough food to sustain the 332 people who walked through the doors. Without additional funding from the city, she doesn’t know how the organization will keep up with the level of need that it’s seeing—including the vital food aid it provides to immigrant families, who are sometimes afraid to leave their homes, and have food from the pantry delivered by dedicated volunteers.
In March, and again this month, “I often found myself in the back of the pantry, hoping to have enough food for everyone to receive,” Grant said, her voice catching for a moment. City funding isn’t a panacea, she acknowledged—but it would help the pantry “fill the gaps,” allowing CFAN members to ”keep the shelves stocked, stabilize purchasing, and ensure that families do not have to choose between food and other essentials.”
CFAN, which partners closely with organizations like the United Way of Greater New Haven, CitySeed, and the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), already has proof of what those dollars can do. After the $482,439 emerged in the budget last year, CFAN set up a small grants program, working with city organizations and emergency food providers to figure out how to best meet residents’ needs.
Susan Harris, who spoke passionately about the number of hungry kids in the city.
According to Santilli, those grants supported a total of “15 food assistance programs that distributed food directly to New Haven residents.” In addition, CFAN was able to use funding to support what it called the School Break Grocery Program, through which NHPS students could pick up groceries during school vacations in December, April, and August.
In its first year of funding, the School Break Grocery Program “served 5,276 students and their families” during the April and December vacations, Santilli said. With additional dollars from the $482,439, CFAN was also able to hire a number of “community navigators,” who could provide SNAP eligibility screenings and information as requirements for the federal program kept changing.
“We took the obligation of steering funds very seriously, particularly because several of us are New Haven residents,” she said in a conversation after her testimony. By then, most of the lights in City Hall had gone off, as though signalling to the alders that it was bedtime. Back inside the Aldermanic Chamber, there were hours of testimony to go.
As the night wore on, some of the most powerful stories came from those who see and feel the strain of food insecurity firsthand. Hart, who shares a home with her 24-year-old-son Arthur, recalled arriving at Wal-Mart for her monthly grocery shopping trip, and realizing only when she’d gotten to the register that her $257 in monthly benefits wouldn’t be enough to cover the items on her regular grocery list.
Hart always buys the same things; “I’m a creature of habit,” she said with a smile. Normally, she has money left over that she knows will get her through the end of the month, or cover a dietary need she wasn’t expecting. This time, she had to start thinking about what she could go without.
“I heard about the war in Iran, I heard about what they [the Trump Administration] were doing, but I thought it wouldn’t affect me,” she said, sporting a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hungry for Change” in fiery orange letters that advocates wore as they testified. “But when I went in April, oh my God! I had to put stuff back!”
Some things, she added, felt doable: she replaced a carton of five dozen eggs with one of three dozen eggs, so she’ll still have protein for the month. She used store-brand cheese instead of the kind she prefers from Land O'Lakes. But for milk, additional eggs, and other items, she’s been relying on the pantry at New Flame Restoration Church on State Street.
For her, the restoration of the funding “means that me and my family will be able to sleep at night,” she said. “It’s crazy. It’s crazy. But we have to do what needs to be done.”
Smith: "Like cutting off air."
Myra Smith, the neighborhood services advocate at Christian Community Action, echoed that call for funding as she spoke to alders. Raised in New Haven as the third of seven children, Smith knows firsthand what it’s like to be hungry, she explained—and also understands the effects of deep, lifelong physical and psychological trauma that stay with a once-hungry kid. As someone who now runs a food pantry in the Hill, she doesn’t want to see any family go through what she did.
“I’m 45, and I still have trauma from going to bed starving,” she said, remembering what it was like to steal from businesses so she would have money to buy food for herself and her siblings. Her voice shaking, she remembered a night many years ago, when she was so hungry that she couldn’t stop crying. Something in her mother “broke,” and she beat Smith, angry that she wouldn’t be quiet.
“Food is vital ... that's [cutting city support is] like cutting off air to people,” she said as she urged alders to find space for the funding in the city budget. “You can’t take away resources that are vital to a community that already needs resources.”