Phylis Allen spends her days looking for things. She searches for potatoes at Sam’s Club, cheap beets and ginger at Walmart and a local grocery store. She studies the weekly inventory from Good Shepherd, Maine’s only food bank, for good deals on butter and cheese. 

Every Monday morning, she shops at three different stores, keeping lists of prices in her head and remembering what particular clients want. On a recent trip to Sam’s Club, she was searching for affordable eggs. 

The diminutive 78-year-old food pantry director found them in a huge cooler. Stretching, she pulled two huge boxes off the top shelf — seven dozen eggs each, $21 a box. “$2.82 a dozen,” she said. “That’s a good price for eggs.” 

The eggs were destined for Neighbor’s Cupboard, the food pantry in Winterport, Maine, that Allen has helped run for the last 17 years. Every Wednesday, she and a tight-knit group of volunteers provide 25 to 30 families with heaping bags of food.

Maine has long been one of the most food insecure states in New England. Directors of food pantries say the task of making sure people are fed is getting harder because of diminishing food supplies, increasing demand and an overwhelming reliance on volunteers, many of whom are retirees with ages up into their 80s.

About 1 in 7 people in rural Waldo County, where Neighbor’s Cupboard is, were food insecure in 2023, a rate that was similar to the state and national average, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will stop collecting and releasing statistics on food insecurity after October, saying on Sept. 20 that the numbers had become “overly politicized.” 

Federal cuts are hurting food banks

In March, the Trump administration cut more than $1 billion from two U.S. Department of Agriculture programs — the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which provides free food to food banks nationwide, and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provides funds to state, territorial and tribal governments to purchase food from local farmers for distribution to hunger relief organizations. 

“I can watch the availability of federal food going down every month,” Allen said. 

Charitable food networks are also bracing for $186 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal low-income nutrition program better known as food stamps. In turn, Feeding America predicts that food pantries will see more demand. 

Complicating matters is the infrastructure through which the United States distributes most food to those who need help. In Maine, the nearly 600 hunger relief agencies that get free and low-cost food from Good Shepherd Food Bank rely on volunteers. This includes 250 food pantries as well as soup kitchens, senior centers, shelters, schools and youth programs.

More than 75% of these organizations rely completely on volunteers, with no paid staff, according to Good Shepherd. 

Anna Korsen, who co-chairs the Ending Hunger in Maine advisory committee, said food pantries alone aren’t the answer to food insecurity.  

“If our goal is to end hunger in Maine, which is a lofty goal, then we’re not going to do that through a charitable food network that’s run by volunteers, right?” she said. “That’s supposed to be for crisis situations … but what has happened is that it is just a part of the food system now. It shouldn’t be.”

Neighbor’s Cupboard hummed with activity on a recent Wednesday morning, cans stacked in piles six feet high and children’s collages taped to a cooler. 

Keith Ritchie was greeting clients — and keeping a gentle eye out to make sure no one took more than their fair share of limited foods. At 89, he is the pantry’s oldest worker, although Betty Williams, 88, teases him about who’s older.

In more than 17 years of service, Ritchie said, “I’ve only missed twice.” He drives 20 miles each way to dole out groceries and fill bags with “surprises” – donated items like Girl Scout cookies.

“You see a lot of people you know,” he said. “I don’t know anybody’s name, but I don’t need a name. I just look at their faces.” 

An aging volunteer workforce

Younger volunteers can be harder to come by than affordable eggs. About 35% of Mainers volunteer — the third-highest rate in the nation, according to a 2024 report on the state of Maine’s civic health. But just 20% of millennials volunteer in Maine, half the rate of Gen Xers and baby boomers, the same report said.

It’s not a lack of desire to serve, but obstacles in the way, said researcher Quixada Moore-Vissing, an author of the report.

“I would categorize it as being an overwhelmed and overworked society,” Moore-Vissing said. “The rising costs of everything, and in particular the cost of housing, means that people have to work more.”

Younger volunteers are increasingly seeking out what the Minnesota Alliance of Nonprofit Advancement calls “event-based” volunteering — one-time efforts with no commitment to future shifts. About 20% of all volunteers contribute through a mix of online and in-person work, according to a 2023 Americorps survey. 

The decline in volunteer numbers and the move toward one-time engagements can cause serious problems. 

Second Harvest Heartland in Minnesota had to turn away thousands of pounds of food in early September because the country’s second-largest food bank didn’t have enough people to sort and package it, volunteer engagement director Julie Greene said. As a result, food pantries in Minnesota and western Wisconsin had less food to give out. 

Greene is struggling to bridge the mismatch between a need for in-person volunteer labor, like produce packers, and the increasing desire for occasional service. 

“How can we provide more of these one-and-done volunteer opportunities, so folks are engaging with us,” she said, “and continue to do what we need to do to get the work done?”

At Neighbor’s Cupboard, Allen said funding cuts aren’t the most challenging part of her work. It’s keeping volunteers, she said, especially, “as they get older and they have health concerns or their families have health concerns.”

Distributing food requires muscle — dependable, strong volunteers who can drive long distances in snow and ice to pick up or deliver heavy boxes of food. 

A year ago, Allen told her colleagues, “Find me a hunk with a truck.” They had lost a 78-year-old volunteer when his wife got sick. Without a replacement, they would have no way to pick up hundreds of pounds of food each week. 

Through word of mouth, Allen found one: 67-year-old Bryan MacLaren. But just months after he’d started, he needed knee surgery. Staff once again had to search for a replacement.

Since March, Maine’s pantries have seen their food from Good Shepherd cut by half or more. So far, Neighbor’s Cupboard has enough to go around, in part because local residents donated 5,000 pounds of food during a May drive. But changes are coming. 

In late August, Allen received an email from Good Shepherd. Because demand is rising, the food bank said, pantries running low on supplies are now allowed to turn away visitors who don’t live nearby — a reversal of Good Shepherd’s long-standing philosophy of food for all.

Allen wasn’t having it. 

“We will keep serving everyone,” she wrote in an email to The Maine Monitor. 

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.