This year, you may have noticed some changes to the food pantry. In the last few months of 2025, our food pantry numbers significantly increased. In 2024, we served 18,000 individuals at the pantry. By the end of 2025, we had served 27,000 individuals, with over 9,000 of those people coming in the last 3 months of the year.
At the same time, the food insecurity landscape has drastically shifted over the last year. Cuts to federal funding, increasing gas and grocery prices, changes to SNAP benefits, and more have made it harder than ever to provide our neighbors with food. There are fewer options to purchase from the Central PA Food Bank (CPFB), and the cost of many of them has increased significantly. This means we have not been able to provide the volume or variety we once did.
LGBTQ+ organizations across the nation have also been struggling over the last year. A recent survey of LGBTQ+ orgs across the country showed that most orgs lost government and/or corporate funding in 2025, due to federal cuts and DEI pushback. While LCCL has not previously received government funding, we did lose several corporate Pride Sponsors last year. Additionally, private funding has become increasingly competitive as nonprofit organizations seek to offset these losses.
In light of our enormous growth and the shifting national landscape, our leadership recognized that we would need to make changes in 2026 to keep the program sustainable and ensure we could prioritize access to nourishing foods while honoring choice, cultural relevance, disability access, and lived experience.
As part of that process, we looked closely at our service and distribution trends. Historically, we’ve served an average of 170 families each week. We have also assessed our capacity and determined that we can sustainably serve between 140 and 200 families each week. As of the end of March, we are maintaining our historic average of 170 families served each week.
Other changes have impacted our volunteers, like adding more grocery stores to our donation pickup rotation. We’ve also shifted our pantry leadership model to one of shared responsibility across three areas of volunteer service: Pantry Distribution, Donation Receiving, and Food Bank Deliveries. We now have multiple people who are trained to coordinate one or more of those activities. In addition to bringing on a team of Pantry Coordinators, we’ve begun listing specific volunteer roles so that it is easier for:
- People to see what they will be doing when they volunteer at our pantry
- Volunteers to choose the roles best aligned with their passion and ability
- Our staff to ensure that we have enough volunteers to manage all of the tasks at our pantry.
Of course, these changes have significantly impacted the experience community members have as they shop at our pantry. Sometimes we have less variety to choose from and more limits on the number of certain items they can take. To those of you who have been impacted by us having both less stock and less variety, we are sorry that we have not been able to serve you the way we once did. If you would like to talk to us about your experience, how changes have affected you, or what you would like to see in the pantry as a client, please reach out to Jessi@LancasterChoosesLove.org
Some foundations and corporations are not interested in providing meaningful funding for food pantries. They often want to fund new, innovative, or fancy ideas. Innovation is great, and we understand why donors want to support these new ideas! But the reality is that people in our community are still going hungry every day. Educational programs, social groups, and mental health initiatives are essential and desperately needed, but when someone is wondering where their next meal will come from, they can’t always engage with these other programs in a meaningful way. People must first know they can survive before they can thrive.
Conversely, other funders have renewed their commitment to meeting basic needs, such as food and housing, as they know how much our communities are struggling, and for this, we are grateful!
Ultimately, we need support from our community to continue to provide food with dignity.
You can:
- Volunteer with the pantry: We need folks to weigh and stock donations, help unload our weekly truck delivery, serve clients, and more.
- Volunteer with our community garden: Our community garden was so successful last year that we decided to have a larger plot this year! We will have a 20×80 plot at the Ephrata Community Garden, and we need your help watering, weeding, and harvesting. The produce we grow allows us to have fresh fruits and veggies available even when availability is limited at CPFB.
- Donate Funds: We continue to be able to purchase pantry staples, eggs, milk, produce, and more from CPFB at a much lower cost than is available in grocery stores. Donating $10 to us stretches further than $10 at the grocery store
- Host a food and hygiene item drive: While your $10 does stretch further at CPFB, we do not have as much variety to choose from as we used to. Additionally, it has always been more challenging for us to source hygiene items. Consider hosting a drive at your workplace, faith community, or club! Add a few hygiene items to your cart on your next grocery store trip. When many people do this, it adds up! We’ve attached a flyer with some of our high need items.
We can’t do this work without you! Thank you for choosing love every day.
