Volunteers Airam Uriarte, left, and Dana Oshiro put produce in a car during a drive-thru Three Square food distribution at Palace Station Thursday, April 9, 2020.
Wednesday, June 10, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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Nearly 450,000 of our neighbors and their children need help, Las Vegas. They’re enduring a two-pronged crisis: They don’t have enough food to eat, and the coronavirus outbreak has put an extreme strain on the community’s biggest provider of donated meals.
In a report issued in late May, Three Square food bank reported that the number of Las Vegas residents suffering food insecurity skyrocketed to 447,820 during the crisis — which translates to 20.5% of the population, or about 1 in 5 residents. That’s up from about 282,510 before the pandemic, or 12.9% of Clark County residents.
Three Square has responded heroically, upping its food distributions to 1.3 million pounds per week, a 30% increase from the precoronavirus level. The extra distributions amount to about 250,000 meals per week.
But the organization, like food banks nationwide, needs support.
One way is to contribute to Three Square Coronavirus Emergency Food Fund by calling 702-644-3663 or visiting the website threesquare.org.
Another is to support Southern Nevada’s congressional delegates in their efforts to increase benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
SNAP is critical, because it provides far more assistance than organizations like Three Square — about nine meals to every one from food banks. Increasing the federal assistance would take pressure off food banks while benefiting tens of millions of Americans by allowing them to purchase food from grocery stores.
Congress did authorize states to make emergency SNAP allotments to families under certain conditions and approved a program that provided one-time payments to low-income families to make up for school meals their kids were no longer receiving. But food security advocates say those measures aren’t enough to help over the long haul of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans, acting on decades of hateful party ideology that disadvantages lower-income Americans, have stonewalled attempts to bolster SNAP by a meaningful amount.
That’s horrible, especially for Nevada, where we’re suffering the nation’s worst unemployment rate.
Commendably, though, our lawmakers in Washington are fighting for those in need. A quick poll of the delegation showed support for increasing the monthly maximum SNAP benefit for all recipients by at least 15%, which would amount to $25 per person per month, along with boosting the minimum benefit to $30 per household from the current level of $16.
That would benefit Nevada families while also taking some of the crushing pressure off of Three Square.
But with the GOP fully committed to letting people go hungry, Three Square needs all the support it can get.
This is an organization that makes its donations go a long way — every $1 given to the organization provides three meals. Its efficiency can also be measured in the fact that Three Square met the need for food despite an enormous drop-off in donations from grocery stores, where a crush of consumer demand left shelves bare of items that normally would have been given to the food bank.
Three Square also had to work around social distancing limitations that limited volunteer efforts, reduced on-site staff support and brought about a need for low-contact food distribution.
For food banks nationwide, the situation has been worse than the Great Depression, which came on more gradually than the pandemic. As reported by Politico, the food bank in Washington, D.C., bought 100 semi-truck loads of food in April — three times what it bought in all of 2019.
“Has this been like any other time? The simple answer is no,” said Radha Muthiah, theorganization’s CEO.
In Las Vegas, as with the rest of the country, there’s no telling when this unprecedented need will ease up. The city is reopening and people are going back to work, but many remain sidelined and it’s anybody’s guess as to how long it will take our economy to fully recover.
By stepping up with financial and moral support, we can help everyone in our community endure the crisis and put Las Vegas in a position to come out of the pandemic even stronger.
