By: Chris Baker, Legislative Strategist & Oregon Hunger Task Force Administrator
Over the past six years, Oregon has experienced a series of disruptions that have tested how we ensure people have access to food: the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 wildfires, and most recently, the 2025 federal government shutdown and SNAP disruption that abruptly halted access for more than 41 million Americans, including over 750,000 Oregonians, to their primary food source.
These moments have made visible both the strength of community-driven responses and the underlying fragility of the systems meant to support them. They have also raised an urgent question: What would it take to build a food system that ensures everyone has access to food every day? One that is not only responsive in times of crisis, but consistently, reliably, and equitably distributes food so that no one goes hungry in Oregon?
Answering that question will require more than reflection, it will require renewed action, leadership, and accountability from those entrusted to shape policy.
A Bold Promise and an Unfinished Reality
Oregon has met moments like this before. In 1989, the Oregon Legislature did something bold. It codified into state statute that all persons have the right to be free from hunger, and that the state will strive to rank among the top in the nation for food security.
To help the state achieve this mandate, it also created the Oregon Hunger Task Force, a body made up of legislators, state agency leaders, food providers, community organizations, and people with lived experience of poverty. This body was charged with researching and documenting hunger in Oregon, coordinating efforts across sectors, and making policy recommendations to reduce food insecurity statewide. More than three decades later, the Task Force remains one of the only entities of its kind in the nation.
In 2006, Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon was created to act as the administrative arm for the Oregon Hunger Task Force, and to create policy to help alleviate hunger. Over the years, the Task Force and Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon have helped advance meaningful policies that expanded access to food across Oregon. Those efforts include establishing a statewide school breakfast mandate, expanding summer and afterschool meal programs, increasing SNAP participation through outreach, strengthening Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) supports, and creating programs that connect families with locally grown food through farmers’ markets. These are real wins. They have put food on the tables of hundreds of thousands of Oregonians.
And yet, hunger persists.
In 2024, the Oregon Hunger Task Force looked to states like Maine that were taking bold steps to end hunger and began developing Oregon’s own Roadmap to End Hunger. In the spring of 2025, in response to federal threats to food assistance programs under H.R.1, the Task Force was asked by the Governor’s office to examine how changes would impact Oregon’s food system.What we found was sobering. The report, Oregon’s Food Assistance System, found that our food assistance system is not truly a system. It is decentralized, fragmented, and unevenly resourced. Unlike infrastructure systems such as transportation, energy, or water, food access in Oregon is not a coordinated statewide system. Instead, it relies on a patchwork of nonprofits, mutual aid groups, the Oregon Food Bank network, and non-network food banks, farmers, state programs, and volunteers. Access to food is uneven. Supply chains are vulnerable. Costs are rising. In short: Oregon has a fragile food assistance system.
Crisis as a Stress Test for Food Access
When faced with a crisis, Oregonians have continually shown that stepping up to feed their friends, families and neighbors is a choice they will make time and time again.
During the pandemic and wildfires, communities stepped up. Restaurants pivoted into mutual aid kitchens. Grassroots organizations rapidly built food distribution systems. Mutual aid and community-led efforts filled gaps that formal systems could not.
Both in 2020 and historically, mutual aid and grassroots efforts were created precisely because traditional systems failed, particularly for BIPOC communities, immigrants, rural residents, and others historically excluded or underserved. Groups like Milk Crate Kitchen and Rogue Food Unites that began in 2020 remain today as lifelines for their communities. Mutual aid, small community and grassroots efforts remain essential. They are often the first and most trusted responders. Yet they continue to operate with little to no sustained funding.
At the same time that community was stepping up, federal and state investments surged. Expanded SNAP benefits, stimulus funding, and emergency programs strengthened the safety net. And the result? Food insecurity in Oregon did not spike as dramatically as expected.
The lesson is clear: When the safety net is funded, it works.
In October and November of 2025, Oregon’s food system was tested again, this time in a very different way. During a federal government shutdown, SNAP, one of the nation’s most critical anti-hunger programs, was abruptly halted. This was not a natural disaster.
It was a policy decision. Tens of thousands of Oregonians were suddenly forced to find alternative ways to eat, often navigating already stretched and fragmented systems while balancing work, childcare, and transportation barriers that make accessing food anything but simple.
Governor Kotek responded quickly, declaring a hunger emergency and directing funding to support food access. $5 million dollars in emergency funds were distributed to the Oregon Food Bank network, along with funding for Oregon’s Tribal Nations. But that response revealed a critical gap. That $5 million supported only one critical but limited segment of Oregon’s food assistance landscape, the Oregon Food Bank network, while thousands of other providers who form the backbone of food access across the state received no state support at all.
After advocacy from community partners, an additional $6.4 million in philanthropic funding was directed to non-network providers. While welcomed, this second round of funding underscored a larger issue: Oregon does not have a system that equitably supports all who are feeding our communities.
The Work Ahead: Aligning Policy with Reality
Accessing food is not as simple as knowing where it is. For people experiencing poverty, barriers like work schedules, lack of childcare, transportation limitations, language barriers and fear of ICE dictate whether food is even accessible. Navigating systems takes time, knowledge, and capacity resources that many simply do not have.
Even when food resources exist, people experiencing poverty may not be able to access them easily because the systems designed to help are often difficult to navigate. This is why community-based and culturally specific organizations matter so deeply. They reduce barriers, build trust, and meet people where they are. Yet, these are the organizations that are most severely underfunded.
For decades, the Oregon Hunger Task Force has made policy recommendations to reduce hunger. Some progress continues, but in this most recent legislative session, many meaningful long-term solutions, including universal school meals for our K-12 kids, failed to advance.
Legislators often say they face difficult decisions. That is true. But the hardest decisions are not being made in the Capitol. For hundreds of thousands of Oregonians living with food insecurity, the daily calculation is painfully simple: Do I pay rent, or buy groceries? Do I skip the doctor so I can afford food? Do I eat tonight, or make sure my child does? For those families, hunger is not an occasional emergency declared by the Governor. It is an emergency every single day.As Oregon reflects on the hunger emergency, the state is developing a broader Plan for Resilience. But resilience must mean more than surviving a crisis. As the Director of the Oregon State University Policy Analysis Lab (OPAL) and Task Force member Mark Edwards notes:
“Resilience… seems to be about responding to crises. But it doesn’t capture thriving. I don’t want kids just surviving the experience of food shortages, I want them to flourish.”
From a food security advocacy perspective, if Oregon is serious about resilience, success should not be measured by how well we manage a temporary emergency. It should be measured against our own statute: that all persons have the right to be free from hunger.
A truly resilient food system in Oregon would mean:
- Sustained, dedicated public funding for food access
- Equitable investment across all providers, not just one network
- Funding models that adjust for inflation and real costs
- Integration with emergency management systems
- Policies that reduce poverty, including dedicated state funding that protects and strengthens SNAP
- Reducing food waste and expanding access to surplus food
Most importantly, it requires recognizing food access as essential infrastructure, foundational to daily life, not just emergency response. Because for too many of our neighbors, hunger is not temporary; it is an emergency they face every single day.
As Oregon moves forward with resilience planning and prepares for changes going into effect from H.R.1, and potential federal changes through the Farm Bill, the Task Force should be used as it was intended – as a resource to guide the state toward a more coordinated, sustainable, and equitable food system.
Hunger is not inevitable. It is the result of policy choices. And resilience requires choosing differently.
If Oregon truly believes that every person has the right to be free from hunger, then it is time to align our policies, investments, and systems with that commitment.
This is a moment of opportunity.
We invite policymakers, partners, and community members to advocate for sustained and equitable food system funding and support policies that address the root causes of hunger. We cannot do that without centering the voices of those most impacted.
Join us in building a resilient food assistance system where everyone can thrive. Ending hunger in Oregon is within reach, but only if we choose, collectively, to make it a priority. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date with us and what you can do to join this work.
Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon (PHFO) works statewide to expand access to food and create more equitable policies to end hunger. For nearly 20 years, PHFO has worked alongside advocates, community members, service providers, state agencies, and elected officials to address the root causes of hunger.
PHFO serves as the administrative arm of the Oregon Hunger Task Force, a legislatively created body that works collaboratively across Oregon to promote awareness, conduct research, and develop policy solutions to end hunger.