Greater Chicago Food Depository

Somebody says, "Hey, I heard you on the radio.

So, you know, just so glad you're doing what you're doing, so thank you." But we're seeing people who are responding to the need, and, uh, there's a new study out by the, uh, Greater Chicago Food Depository, and in our area, 47% of all families, all families that have children are food insecure.

And that was, uh, that's, it's an increase, and it's really shocking that almost half of our kids are worried about where their next meal is coming from.

And I think that's, if that doesn't motivate people to go, "You know what? I, I can't feed all of them, but I can feed some of them," um, I, I'm not sure what will.

And when I started, I was shocked that a concept like this, what we do here specific to the state of Israel, this type of work has been going on in the states for, you know, over 50 years.

You have City Harvest in New York, you're from Chicago, you have the Chicago Food Depository, you know, world-beating organizations doing this.

And how could it have been that the land of so many amutotas, we call them in Hebrew, not-for-profits, that this concept of a food bank just finding sources of food and giving them out to need-based organizations, maybe it was cockamamie here because no one had done it, which is so surprising to me to this day that that's the case because we have every not-for-profit that you could ever imagine here, just like anywhere else.

And so how is this missing? So some of the stuff we do is, And the scope of it and how quickly we're able to develop it, that is different than other places.

In a year in which more grocery stores have closed on the South and West sides, SNAP benefits have been stripped from tens of thousands of households, and the prices at the grocery stores are still going up.

You have been covering a recent study from the Greater Chicago Food Depository and NORC at the University of Chicago.

Yeah, this report just came out this week and they surveyed Chicago residents this past summer and asking them a variety of questions about basically like their level of food insecurity.

And they found that 35 percent of households face some level of food insecurity.

I visited the food pantry at Legler Regional, which opened up more consistently at the top of the year.

And when I was there, the line from downstairs up through the library, so many people there looking for resources.

We talked to the folks over at the Greater Chicago Food Depository, and there was this feeling at the top of the year that with across the state of Illinois, I think some 170,000 people vulnerable to losing SNAP, they were afraid of how long they would be able to sort of hold the levies.

When you talk to folks at these pantries, are they finding it themselves harder to meet the increased demand?

names up there.

So why didn't you go through the Greater Chicago Food Depository to get your...

We have applied with the Greater Chicago Food Depository to be a partner, but they currently aren't taking new partners.

So we're on the waiting list, and...

In the meantime, we're hoping to find a larger storage space ourselves so that when and if that does come, we have the capacity to store more food.