CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Eight months into her tenure as the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank Chief Executive Officer, Kari Deiner held her first public online CEO Forum with stakeholders, discussing the challenge of demand being up and supply being down.

“Since I started in August, we have certainly put out a lot of fires here in the region, and unfortunately we’re seeing the highest numbers of guests than ever before in our 45-year history,” Diener told Cville Right Now.

The numbers have increased steadily since the start of the pandemic, and they thought they’d hit a peak during the pandemic as many people couldn’t work and earnings were down.

But a number of factors since the pandemic was declared over have pushed even more people toward them, even as more people started working.

“Currently we’re serving around 177,000 visitors to our pantry network every month on average, and about 1-in-3 of those are children and 1-in-5 are seniors,” Diener said.

She said, “Before the pandemic, we were responding to just over 103,000 visitors each month, and at the height of the pandemic in April 2020 we saw about 141,000 visits in one month.”

“You know, back then, staff said they would never see anything like that ever again, and flash forward into today, in all candor, we’ve just been so surprised and really dismayed by the continued growth in need.”

She said these CEO calls are opportunities for her to connect with the stakeholders across organizations who are part of the food pantry network in the 25 county network the BRAFB serves.

They’re able to share information to make food distribution as efficient as possible across the area.

“There are many factors that play into (the continued visitor increase),” Diener noted.

She said, “Of course, the cost of living, the government shutdown, you know a lot of our neighbors are making really tough choices every month between paying rent, purchasing food, health care costs, the cost of child care.”

On the supply side, “Currently we are delivering out around 33-million pounds of food out to our network every year, which is about the equivalent of 27-and-a-half million meals.”

“Unfortunately, this year, we have seen a reduction in food that we receive from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, down about 20-to-25 percent from last year at this time,” Diener said.

“So we are filling in more from food that we receive through donations we receive from retail grocers, from our local farmers, and we also purchase a lot of food as well.”

She said, “We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to pass through a lot of that purchased food to our network, to our many stakeholders, we have about 400 partners across the region who are filling in the gaps by purchasing food and flowing that down to them to allow them to serve the numbers of people they’ve served before.”

They’ve seen less food donated over the past few years from retail groceries because of inventory efficiencies many have adapted to reduce the amount of unsold product.

However, they still receive significant monetary donations in addition to actual food from those retailers.

“We’re leaning into other sources of food to help fill those gaps, and one I’m particularly excited about is the local food movements,” she said.

She’s “hopeful” for increased funding for the Virginia Agriculture Food Assistance Program this year which allows food banks to purchase food from local farmers.”

“That’s a win-win, because we see the flow down into our local economy, as well,” she said.

She said they value the many ways the community gets involved.

One of the ways people get involved is volunteering at their local food pantry, as they had about 1900 volunteers last year at the food bank alone and many more at the pantries.

Monetary donations are hugely valued as well, she said, “We regularly give out grants to our partners to help them upgrade their refrigeration, and purchase vans, purchase shelving, things like that.”

She said hunger affects every 1-in-9 neighbors in their service area, and they work to feed people “one meal, one moment, one donation at a time“.