For Haywood Christian Ministry (HCM), the past year has been one of fast and dramatic pendulum swings. At the end of 2024, the Waynesville-based nonprofit was fully immersed in Hurricane Helene relief efforts for its Western North Carolina community. With churches, community centers, and other organizations setting up food distribution sites around the region and local farmers grappling with the loss of their usual market channels, HCM found a unique opportunity amidst the tragedy to connect locally sourced fresh food to the people who needed it most.
“We like to say that we basically built a food hub in two weeks, out of necessity,” says Nicole Hinebaugh, HCM’s Director of Food Security Programming. With grocery stores, farmers markets, and restaurants shuttered after the storm, NC farmers needed somewhere to sell their harvest. HCM leveraged the influx of hurricane relief donations to purchase food from those farmers at market rate and distribute it through a newly formalized network of partner agencies. It was a win-win solution for both farmers and community members affected by the disaster.
With donations from across the country and funding from North Carolina’s Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP), HCM seized on this momentum to expand local sourcing of healthy foods to help fight food insecurity. Soon, they were sourcing food from over 60 local growers and, in January, secured a location for the new Smoky Mountain Harvest Hub, a food hub that would purchase and aggregate locally produced food for distribution in Haywood County.
But that momentum stalled in the spring and summer of 2025, when federal and state funding cuts rocked North Carolina’s food security ecosystem.
Governments gut food assistance programs
For Haywood Christian Ministry, the biggest blow was the loss of funding from the Healthy Opportunities Pilot program, which the North Carolina legislature declined to continue funding in June. Lauded nationwide for its success in helping low-income North Carolinians reduce their grocery and healthcare bills and live healthier lives, the Medicaid-funded Healthy Opportunities Pilot (HOP) provided healthy food deliveries, home safety repairs, rides to doctor appointments, and other assistance to nearly 30,000 people in predominantly rural regions of North Carolina. By addressing social determinants of health such as healthy diets, safe and secure housing, and access to medical facilities, HOP served as a proactive and preventative measure that reduced Medicare expenses by as much as $1,020 per year per beneficiary who participated in the pilot.
Haywood Christian Ministry used HOP funds to provide fruit and vegetable prescriptions and weekly food boxes for Medicaid recipients, all using locally sourced produce. The program offered a reliable source of unrestricted funds that allowed HCM to provide targeted assistance to the community’s most needy families while also ramping up its local food sourcing. With the program cancelled, says HCM Executive Director Blake Hart, “it’s hampered our ability to get food out, and also the expansions that we were hoping to do with local food.”
At the same time, the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were slashing funding for federal programs that many food banks and food pantries in North Carolina rely upon. Reuters reports that in the spring, USDA paused or cancelled half the funding — about $500 million nationwide — for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which purchases food from U.S. farmers for distribution by food banks and food pantries. It also eliminated the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement (LFPA) and the LFPA Plus Programs, which provided an additional $500 million in funding for food banks to purchase and distribute fresh food directly from local farms.
In North Carolina, LFPA cancellations alone represented a loss of over $11 million for food banks and food pantries. For many, the end of these programs removes a significant portion of their budget for local sourcing and threatens their ability to get fresh, healthy food for their communities.
MANNA FoodBank, which distributes food to nonprofit partners across 16 counties in Western North Carolina, had received $1.3 million through LFPA Plus, which it used to directly source produce, meat, eggs, grains, and dairy from over 100 local and regional farms, according to a statement from CEO Claire Neal. The loss of that funding, says MANNA’s Director of Network Strategy and Partnerships Kristi Rose, equals about 5.2 million meals for neighbors in need.
It’s a similar story at CORA Food Pantry in Chatham County, which lost a $48,000 LFPA grant and about $300,000 in TEFAP food allocations to the cuts. “It will impact the way we serve people,” says CORA’s Executive Director, Melissa Driver Beard. “People won’t be able to leave with quite as much food,” she says — and local farmers will also lose a key buyer.
Haywood Christian Ministry’s Hinebaugh notes the broader ripple effect: “All those cuts represent a huge loss to the available market channels for local farmers, particularly for small to mid-scale family farms that aren’t operating on a scale where they’re able to take advantage of more traditional avenues, like selling to grocery stores. And so they’re going to feel that impact significantly.”
Food insecurity at record levels
With food insecurity on the rise across many areas of North Carolina, the cuts couldn’t come at a worse time. “Since Hurricane Helene, food insecurity in our region is at record levels. We’re at more than double where we were pre-COVID,” says Rose from MANNA FoodBank. “We’re averaging around 170,000 pantry visits each month. In June, we saw the highest month in our 42-year history.”
In Chatham County, Melissa Driver Beard estimates that 10-11% of the population experiences food insecurity. “When the pandemic hit, we assumed that no year would ever be worse than 2020 and that our numbers would only go down from there, which has been as far from the truth as I could have imagined,” she says. Food assistance requests at CORA climbed from 60,000 in 2020 to 90,000 in 2024, and reached 109,000 by mid-2025 — enough to feed every Chatham County resident for at least a week, plus thousands more. “Every year, we’ve seen more and more people come to the pantry, and we’re seeing them come more often.”
With ongoing uncertainty about the future of federal food assistance, food insecurity professionals predict this strain will only continue to worsen. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed the Republican Congress in July, includes cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that will push as many as 2.7 million Americans off of benefits over the next several years. NC food aid leaders worry that the SNAP cuts could more than double demand for their services.
Hinebaugh likens the situation to the “bad old days” of the post-COVID-19 benefits cliff, when federal pandemic assistance programs expired. After those resources disappeared, community need increased, but rising food costs and reduced donations meant that food pantries couldn’t keep up with demand. “And so what happened as a result of that was people went hungry, so the level of food insecurity doubled. But the level of hunger — the most extreme form of food insecurity, when people are losing weight because they can’t get enough food — quadrupled during that time,” she says. “We watched it play out in our community. We’re concerned that that could happen again.”
A new future for local food access
Amidst this perfect storm of threats to food security, how are food pantries preparing to meet the needs of their communities?
For some, it means turning to alternative sources of funding. CORA, which opened its second pantry location this year, is fortunate to have a reliable network of community support to draw from. “About 10 to 15% of all of our food donations come directly from the community, which is really just a wonderful resource for us,” says Beard. “We’re trying to do more community-level food drives this year than in the past, because not only does it generate additional food for us, but because everything we do with the community helps generate more knowledge about CORA and about food insecurity in the area.” In an ideal world, the state government would step up to replace some of the lost federal funds, but in the absence of that, Beard remains hopeful that some of the larger charitable funders in the area will place a renewed emphasis on food access, as they did during the pandemic.
At the same time, pantries are also strategically targeting their resources to better meet the biggest areas of need, informed by feedback from the community. In community listening sessions, MANNA FoodBank found that folks experiencing food insecurity tend to struggle most with finding fresh produce and protein-rich staples like eggs, meat, and cheese. In response, MANNA is launching an Essential Foods Program to make these items consistently available for their downstream partner agencies, sourcing locally when possible to strengthen the regional farm economy. “We’re being really intentional about our use of funds, so that we’re using our dollars that we do have in the way that will be most impactful for our neighbors and the community,” says Rose.
Haywood Christian Ministries recently completed a comprehensive community food assessment of Haywood County, using survey data to pinpoint pockets of existing need. “One thing that [the survey] helps us do is prepare for the worsening state of food insecurity that we anticipate coming down the pike, so that we can prepare for that by putting some programs in place to help meet those vulnerable community needs,” says Hinebaugh. HCM is in the process of developing a mobile market system that will intentionally target geographic areas identified by the assessment as having the most severe food insecurity or the biggest gaps in available resources. They’ve also implemented a food locker program, with five refrigerated lockers across the county, where people who might have trouble traveling to a food pantry during working hours can instead pick up healthy food boxes with 24/7 accessibility. Putting these programs in place now so that they can scale up later allows HCM to take a proactive stance ahead of future SNAP cuts, says Hinebaugh.
If there’s one lesson learned from Hurricane Helene, says Hart, it’s the need for strategic partnerships and ongoing collaboration to fill in the gaps in need. “I think that in order for all of us to meet the moment that we are about to be faced with, it’s going to be more important than ever before that we come together in strategies and solutions and collaboration and cooperation,” he says. “The days of trying to solve any problem in a silo are over. And if any of us want to make a real dent in the challenges coming our way, we have to do it together. We have to do it in partnership.”
But accomplishing that, he adds, requires a broader cultural understanding of food insecurity, and a recognition that people deserve to have food and to have their needs met — an empathetic stance that he worries has been lost in some circles.
Beard agrees. “I wish more people understood just how prevalent hunger and food insecurity are. So many people really are just one car accident, one major home repair, one scary cancer diagnosis away from needing some kind of support. And I really do wish that everybody was aware of that, and that anybody who walks in my doors deserves to be there.”