Tucked away in a strip mall just 5 minutes off of I-69 sits a whiteboard with Pantry 279 written in black marker. Inside, volunteers bustle about, packing box after box with essential ingredients and food items for a Thanksgiving meal.

There are pallets stacked high with two types of boxes; Box A is meant for smaller families, and Box B is intended for larger ones, with double the amount of food inside. The plan is to feed somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500 families, but the goal was to feed more.

“Up until this year, we’ve always managed to get the families we typically serve every month covered. Not this year,” Director Cindy Chavez said.

Chavez said last month alone they served almost 2,700 families, which means 200 of their regular families won’t be able to sign up for their Thanksgiving meal program. She said it’s a symptom of a larger uphill battle trying to get donations and keep operations running through the holidays. Pantry 279’s Thanksgiving program feeds thousands, handing out box after box at Monroe County Fairgrounds and delivering them to people’s homes. This is all on top of their normal pantry operations, which many in the area rely on regularly for food.

“People still need to have their regular weekly food,” Chavez said. “Thanksgiving’s nice, but it’s one week, it’s just one day that’s really big, but then they still have to have food for the rest of the week.”

Despite people’s dependence on them, donations are scarce at times, and recent economic hardships have only made it worse.

Food shortages have also had their toll on pantries like Pantry 279. The USDA has said there are no nationwide shortages of food, but that restocking may be taking longer than usual in some places. Chavez said they searched stores all across town for ingredients like cranberry sauce and began to run low on things like Jiffy corn muffin mix.

“There is a food shortage, whether you want to believe that or not,” Chavez said.

Inflation has also taken its toll; according to a report from the New York Times, last year’s Thanksgiving ingredients and groceries were some of the most expensive to date, and this year, some of those prices have gone up even more. Chavez also said higher local utility bills along with rising gas prices have made it hard for families to buy food for themselves, let alone donate to the pantry.

It’s a vicious cycle: fewer people are financially able to offer donations while more and more people need them

Pantry 279 is not the only one struggling, too. Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, just 15 minutes away, is also facing donation shortages. Shelves that should be filled with groceries and supplies are bare. Operations director Kristen Lucas said during the pandemic, donations were high, but now, that’s beginning to disappear, and so is the grant money they often rely on to keep things running behind the scenes.

While food donations are often the first thing that jumps to people’s minds, Lucas said they often need monetary donations to give them the flexibility to be able to buy the food items they need most often.

“I think there’s a barrier from folks knowing that food’s very expensive and we don’t have the opportunity to outright purchase it very often so when people donate money here for that, it gives us some spending power so we can actually put some more food into the pantry,” Lucas said.

They also said that while they receive grant funding, it’s often limited in what it can be used or given out for, and the staff often struggles because of that.

“So many grants want to fund programs, but they don’t want to fund the folks who are running the programs so the hardest thing to actually get money for is salaries. I think that’s the biggest uphill battle for our development team,” Lucas said. “I think that can be something you find at a lot of nonprofits— that folks who are working at the nonprofits actually need the services at the nonprofits.”

Despite the shortages, inflation and lack of donations, these pantries aren’t backing down. In fact, they’re sticking together. MHC helped promote the Pantry 279 Thanksgiving program, and they often partner with other pantries when they’re hosting a program that people on the other side of town might need to know about. Hoosier Hills Food Bank helped Pantry 279 with some of its Thanksgiving supplies.

And even with shortages, inflation, rising gas prices, and freezing cold weather, there are still those who bring what they can to the pantries. Sometimes all they have is a few cans, other times they come with boxes full. Often, people ask if their donation is too little to accept. Whether they’re at MHC, Pantry 279, or somewhere else, the answer is always the same: no donation is too small.