A report released last month found that 54% of Native American respondents could not afford to eat balanced meals sometimes or often during Covid. Food banks are trying to lower that number, working directly with tribes to help communities eat more healthy and locally sourced food from Indigenous producers.

By the time a new food program to serve Indigenous populations in Wisconsin wraps up at the end of this month, it will have distributed more than 10,000 food boxes to Tribal Elders throughout the state. For the hunger-relief organizations involved, it also will have provided a new perspective on how to run food distribution programs.

“Oftentimes, as food banks, we find ourselves trying to serve everyone in the biggest capacity we can,” said Stephanie Jung Dorfman, Executive Director of Feeding Wisconsin, which was awarded a Feeding America grant to run the program along with the Intertribal Agriculture Council and local Indigenous sovereign nations.

This program allowed us to step back and think about our role in ending hunger by getting the right food to the right folks,” Dorfman said.

Addressing hunger in Native American communities is a high priority, given the alarming rates of food insecurity on tribal lands. A report released this month found that 54% of Native American respondents could not afford to eat balanced meals sometimes or often during Covid, and more than a third ate less than they should because they did not have enough money for food.

In Wisconsin, the realization that traditional hunger relief efforts were not always striking the right chord in Native American communities came with initial distributions of the USDA’s Farmers to Families Food Box Program. While the boxes helped alleviate hunger in Native American communities hit hard by the pandemic, they were not designed with individual communities’ dietary needs in mind.

Read the full article about feeding Native communities by Camille Bond at The Counter.