Gov. Andy Beshear wrote in an Oct. 15 letter that 80,622 Kentuckians had lost SNAP benefits, among them 24,655 children and 6,572 seniors. The people filling the hole are mostly small, unfunded groups, and some of them are Black-led.
Tiffany Bellfield El-Amin runs the Kentucky Black Farmers Association from Ballew Estates, her family’s fifth-generation farm in Madison County. She says she saw the cuts coming. “We knew that something like this was going to happen, and we had been urging our families to learn the community source ways,” she told Prism, which reported the story Tuesday. The state figures are not broken down by race, so the numbers here cannot say how many of the 80,622 are Black. But the Association and Louisville’s food-justice group Change Today, Change Tomorrow are among the groups answering the loss.
Queer Kentucky, led by executive director Missy Spears, co-created the COVUnity Fridge in Covington, a community refrigerator anyone can open. “The reason that the fridge works is we’ve kind of set it up to be as low maintenance as possible,” Spears said. The Louisville Pride Foundation runs a food pantry, and the Kentucky Health Justice Network’s trans health program pairs food help with care.
The demand is landing on places that are running short. At the Sister Visitor Center in Louisville, director Sister Paris Slapikas told Spectrum News that visits from people coming once a month are up 23%, and visits from people coming every week are up 77%. The center served nearly 3,000 people in October. “Because we have less food to provide to them,” she said, “that gap of people coming is getting bigger and bigger.”
Dare to Care Food Bank, which operates across 13 counties, says it is down about 3 million pounds in federal commodities. Its president and CEO, Vincent James, said food banks were never meant to stand in for the program. “Food banks exist to respond to moments of crisis,” he said. “We were never intended to replace programs like SNAP.”
Kentucky had 546,542 people on SNAP as of September, roughly 100,000 fewer than a year earlier. About one in five Kentuckians is food insecure. The drop follows the 2025 budget law that raised the age limit for work requirements to 64 and told states to cover 75% of administrative costs, up from 50%. Prism puts the five-year federal reduction at $16.9 billion.
This is a policy choice, not weather. Congress cut the benefit and passed part of the bill to the states, and the people left to cover it are churches, farmers and neighbors with a refrigerator and a volunteer schedule. Mutual aid is generous, and it is not enough: no fridge in Covington replaces a monthly benefit for 80,622 people. Congress can restore the money. Until it does, the lines at Louisville’s pantries will keep getting longer.
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