At the same time as the economic blow of COVID-19 makes it harder for many families to put enough food on the table, the pandemic has decimated the workforce at one of Connecticut’s major food banks that annually provides millions of meals.
“We typically have 6,500 volunteers per year,” who are mostly employees at Hartford-area corporations that now work from home, said Jason Jakubowski, president of Foodshare. “But from the earliest days of COVID, our corporate volunteer base has almost completely disappeared. As a result, we have had to hire more than a dozen part-time temporary workers to fill in the gaps – and that has proven costly.”
Those financial and staffing challenges presented by the pandemic are confronting the majority of Connecticut’s nonprofit providers, who are seeing an unprecedented spike in need for their services. Some fear they will have to close their doors before the end of the year.
Their concerns are documented in a recent survey conducted by The CT Community Nonprofit Alliance, which represents hundreds of human service and arts and culture nonprofit organizations across the state.