What is the need for food assistance like in Greater Cleveland?

Despite the Food Bank's reach throughout the community, there was significant and growing need for food assistance. Before the pandemic:

• One in six people in the Food Bank’s service area is food insecure, meaning they do not know where their next meal will come from.
• Cleveland’s child poverty rate has been consistently among the highest of large U.S. cities.
• Nearly one in four senior citizens in the Greater Cleveland area were at risk of hunger.
• Since the start of the pandemic, we have served 154,000+ households and 62,000+ are new, meaning they have visited an emergency feeding program for the first time.
• The pandemic has doubled the number of new clients we’ve seen over the past year and we distributed more than 56 million pounds of food in FY2020.