“We had more people today than I’ve seen in the nine years I have been here,” said Steve Werlin, director of the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK), describing the scene at their food pantry in New Haven on November 5th, 2025 during the freeze on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Each month, those eligible for SNAP benefits receive money on their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, which they can then use at a SNAP authorized store to buy food. Amid the 2025 government shutdown, however, the Trump administration froze SNAP benefits in the month of November. EBT cards went empty, and 360,000 Connecticut residents were prevented from receiving $72 million in food assistance.
“There were a lot of people who were very willing to share their stories,” Werlin described. The devastating issue had brought reporters to the pantry to listen. “But there were other people who were so upset—so visibly upset—that they couldn’t even bring themselves to stay in front of the camera.”
SNAP helps 41 million people nationwide buy food, but the program is more than just that. “We call SNAP food assistance, but really what it is, is income,” said Werlin. “When people don’t have the funding on their EBT cards to pay for groceries, they have to use whatever income they do have and make decisions. They have to say, ‘Do I spend this on groceries, or do I spend this on rent, or do I spend this on utilities, or medication, or gasoline to get to work?’”
This event was not the only attack on the program—President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 changed eligibility requirements so fewer Americans are able to access this needed income. In Connecticut, 58,000 families are projected to lose SNAP benefits due to these permanent changes. As the government shutdown came to an end on November 12th, SNAP benefits were set to return by November 20th, but not everyone who needs them will be receiving them.
These are just two in a series of federal funding freezes that have caused major trouble for people facing food and housing insecurity since President Trump took office in January. As of June 2024, President Trump had blocked an unprecedented $425 billion in funding across various sectors including domestic aid. This abrupt change has been felt deeply in New Haven, where a large portion of the population faces food and housing insecurity.
“There are 16 discrete neighborhoods in New Haven, and 11 have poverty rates above 25%, compared to the median poverty rate across the state, which is about 12%,” Greg DePetris, board chair of New Haven’s Community Soup Kitchen (CSK), an organization which served over 86,000 meals across seven locations in 2024, relayed. “What we have done is pick distribution locations where there are clearly food gaps in emergency meal services, and fill them.”
CSK and DESK are two actors working in a network of non-for-profit organizations that have devoted themselves to filling these gaps in New Haven—a task that has grown increasingly difficult in recent months. The loss of SNAP, even if it was only temporary for some, brought unprecedented numbers to DESK’s doors. But even prior to the uncertainty surrounding SNAP, DESK was being affected by cuts to a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) program called The Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TFAP. This program sends commodity foods to regional food banks, such as Connecticut Food Share, which then distributes to local food pantries and organizations. TFAP accounted for roughly 40% of DESK’s total food acquisition. “We find ourselves not able to have quite as much food on our shelves, and scrambling to make up the difference, finding ourselves spending cash on food—which is something that we haven’t done in large amounts over the years,” Werlin said.
In 2017, Kimberly Hart founded the New Haven branch of Witnesses to Hunger—an organization telling people’s stories of their experiences with hunger and poverty and advocating for food security. Hart has experienced food insecurity herself, and in the past year, as funding cuts were passed down from the federal government, she has borne witness to the struggles food pantries are facing in their attempts to feed the community.
“There has been a lot of concern and worry,” Hart explained, “not only about the amount of food we are getting, but the type of food we are getting. With my SNAP benefits, I can buy canned stuff, but I need the food pantry to give me dairy products, meats, eggs—stuff that is more expensive. They can’t because their hands are tied.”
The Community Soup Kitchen receives food primarily through the Connecticut Food Share, Yale Hospitality, and local donations, including from nonprofits like Haven’s Harvest and restaurants including Cafe George by Paula. As CSK is entirely privately funded, it was able to operate fully despite federal cutbacks, but has had to adapt to the vast changes in the New Haven landscape.
“The Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Resettlement Services (IRIS) was exposed to federal funding cuts. One of the things that IRIS did was support a food pantry at 75 Hamilton Street in Fair Haven, and that food pantry serves roughly 650 to 700 families each week. When they lost their funding, we made a decision as an organization to step in and cover the cost of making sure that that food pantry stayed open,” DePetris said. DePetris pointed to CSK’s mission to “feed the hungry, regardless of circumstances,” as their driving motivator for stepping in. However, in the past several years, it has not been possible for local organizations to serve all the people who need it, especially in the housing sphere.
According to Kellyann Day, CEO of New Reach––a nonprofit providing rapid re-housing, rental assistance, and permanent supportive housing––she has watched the pressure on the people of New Haven her organization serves intensify sharply in recent years. “What’s been affecting us, and what’s going to potentially get worse when certain decisions are made in Washington, is that the housing market is out of control. In the past 10 years, the rent in Greater New Haven has gone up 75%.” This crisis has most affected elderly neighbors on fixed incomes, young families who can’t afford a house, and everyone else at the mercy of the rental market.
In a 2025 City of New Haven press release, Mayor Elicker stated, “We know that Connecticut, along with many other states across the nation, is facing a housing crisis. With 110,000 fewer housing units than is needed to meet the statewide demand, we see the resulting rise in housing instability and homelessness in our cities.” He added, “In the City of New Haven, roughly 300 residents return to homelessness every year and we don’t want people to keep going through this cycle, we want people to have long term success—a main contributor is the lack of permanent supportive housing.” The same press release reported that in 2024, the number of unsheltered individuals doubled to over 630 people.
New Reach and other groups that are trying to alleviate the problem are also losing their federal funding. New Reach is anxiously awaiting the federal government to release the funding for Continuum of Care, which funds many safety net housing programs in the state. “We don’t know what the cuts to that are going to look like, so we are very fearful that they are going to be significant, which would just add insult to injury with what’s going on with food,” Day said.
If these funds do not come through, many New Reach tenants could lose their subsidized housing, and homelessness in New Haven could double. New Reach also provides rental assistance to landlords; without it many could no longer keep tenants who aren’t able to pay their bills. Those tenants, once displaced, would struggle even more to meet basic expenses like taxes and insurance. The economic ripple effects would be immense.
In addition to its food pantry, DESK does programming around homelessness services and overdose prevention work. In each of these sectors, the entire network of organizations work together and fail together. According to Werlin, “If our partners aren’t getting funding to get people housed, then people are not leaving shelters, and people are therefore lining up longer and longer outside of our drop-in center. Working as part of an interconnected web of social services means that we rely on everybody to be doing their part and have stable funding. And when pieces of that collapse, that’s where things fall apart.”
Hart has positioned Witnesses to Hunger as a crucial voice that tells policymakers what people need. According to Hart, “We bring our stories to lawmakers, policymakers, and tell them that the things that they are proposing or cutting, aren’t conducive to our lives. That it is just not acceptable.” In Hart’s view, Connecticut state policymakers have done their best to listen to these concerns and protect their constituents. “They have been a friend of ours,” Hart said. “The Democratic legislatures are in favor of what we are telling them – they agree. We call them, we email them, we tell them about the issues, and when it comes time to pass laws, they can say ‘200 of my constituents called me about the same subject.’”
Local people and organizations, too, have rallied to support DESK, CSK, and New Reach in filling the gaps that are only widening. “New Haven is full of people who have big hearts and look out for their neighbors. We have had corporate sponsors step in and provide funding and support for us to continue expanding the reach and impact of what we do,” DePetris said.
However, there is only so much that can be done in the face of immense federal-level changes and economic situations that are affecting more and more people each day. “The housing providers and the food providers––we’re the safety net for when people experience a crisis,” Day described. “We are not funded, nor are we designed to be the emergency response when everybody’s experiencing a crisis. Our shelters are overflowing, our food pantries are overflowing, and the federal government just does not care about what’s happening.”
The New Haven branch of Witnesses to Hunger is the only branch of the organization still running. Its members––many of whom have experienced food insecurity––have decided to forgo eating lunch together in order to preserve the funds necessary to keep their meetings running—an irony that exemplifies their determination to change minds and look out for the wellbeing of their children, neighbors, and community members. As Day said, they repeat one motto to steady themselves in this crisis: “We will get through this because we have to get through this.”