Kyla Raygor wants her son to give back. It’s important to her that Jackson, who is 11, understands how fortunate he is to never open his family’s fridge or pantry and wonder why it looks so bare. It’s also important, she says, that he learns to do something to help those who find themselves in such situations.
So on a sweaty Tuesday afternoon in mid-June, Kyla and Jackson slipped on matching hair nets and blue food-service gloves and joined an assembly line of volunteers at the Houston Food Bank.
Volunteers have always been an integral part of the complex supply-and-distribution chain at the nation’s largest food bank, located in a warehouse district east of Houston’s downtown area.
“We have about 90,000 volunteers annually,” the food bank’s chief development officer, Julie Voss, told Straight Arrow News. That’s 90,000 people, she noted – not 90,000 volunteer shifts – and many show up regularly. On average, the food bank welcomes more than 1,000 volunteers daily, according to Voss.
In the months since the cancellation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s $470 million Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA), which funded the purchase of locally produced food by food banks across the country, the need for volunteers has become even more pronounced, Voss said.
“A lot of what we got from the USDA was in smaller amounts,” she said. “And so now, we’re still able to rescue food, but instead of getting food from smaller farmers, we’re getting these huge, bulk items, and they have to be separated out.”
That requires a lot more time to process the food. Just ask Kyla and Jackson Raygor.
Their task, along with the friends and strangers gathered around them, was to transform a massive cardboard box containing a literal ton of rice into 1,000 two-pound portions that could then be given to people in need. It was an easy, if not repetitive, job: Kyla poured the portion scooped out by the volunteer to her right into a plastic bag; Jackson sealed it, then passed it to the neighbor on his left, who tucked it gently into a box with exactly seven other bags. Over, and over, and over.
Finding a way to give back
“There aren’t a lot of volunteer opportunities for someone his age,” Kyla said, adding a bag of rice to Jackson’s queue. The food bank, Kyla learned during a fifth-grade class field trip with Jackson’s school, has a low barrier of entry for volunteers. The mother-son team needed only to sign up for a single three-hour shift and would be onboarded along the way. What’s more, they would see their impact in real time as the big box of rice to their right steadily shrank, and the pallet of portioned rice on their left grew.
Houston is a unique and complicated city, where two things are true at once: Roughly 50% of residents give $25 or more to nonprofits annually, but 45% are unable to come up with $400 to cover an emergency. In short, while 90,000 people give their time to the food bank, there are plenty more who need help accessing food themselves.
The nonprofit group Feeding America reports that 18.2% of people living in Houston’s Harris County – or approximately 864,000 people – are “food insecure,” meaning they lack reliable access to enough affordable and nutritious food. That’s up from 16.4% in 2022.
Cindy Freeman, a 10-year food bank volunteer scooping rice at an assembly line behind the Raygors, teared up as she described a volunteer shift earlier this summer.
“I saw someone I used to volunteer with at a community garden,” she said. Years earlier, Freeman and the woman had worked with their church to turn their garden’s harvest into food for those in need. But this summer, Freeman said, the woman wasn’t looking for a place to help others. She needed food to take home herself.
“It makes this,” Freeman said, casting her gaze toward the never-ending box of rice in front of her, “hit home.”
An increasing need
While Houston claims the nation’s largest food bank, it is certainly not the only city where funding cuts have brought about a need for creative problem solving and increased volunteer hours.
“What this means is a greater strain on an organization like ours,” said George Matysik, executive director of Philadelphia’s local food bank, Share Food Program. “But we’re incredibly fortunate to have folks who are standing side by side with us at what is, without question, the most challenging time for food banks in the last 40 years – and I would include the pandemic in that.”
Early in the pandemic, supply chain issues put a huge strain on food banks. However, throughout the summer of 2020, as those issues corrected themselves, Matysik said his food bank was able to keep pace with demand. Later that year, federal programs kicked extra funds toward food bank initiatives.
“In 2021, we actually saw a huge reduction in the amount of folks that were coming to food banks and the amount of folks who needed additional assistance,” Matysik said. “And we actually saw poverty drop in 2021.”
The rates are back up now, as is the number of Americans designated as “food insecure.” According to the 2025 Feeding America survey, “people in food-insecure households need an additional $22.37 per person per week to have just enough money to cover their food needs.”
That’s up 5.1% from the previous year when the budget shortfall was $21.28 and 1% when accounting for inflation. Since 2020, the shortfall has increased by 55%, according to the Feeding America data, “suggesting that the inflation of 2022 and the elevated prices of 2023 do not tell the whole story.”
To Matysik, the cancellation of the Local Food Purchase Agreement, from which the funds could help close this gap, feels like “an attack” on generations of programming that has lifted people out of poverty and an “outright breaking of a signed deal.”
The USDA sees it differently. According to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, the cuts are part of a push to emphasize “eliminating wasteful spending.” When asked to comment on this story, a spokesperson for the USDA told Straight Arrow News, “We do not comment on pending litigation.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro filed a lawsuit in federal court to contest the LFPA cuts. Shapiro announced his lawsuit from a podium at a Share Food warehouse.
‘Chances are, you do know someone who’s food insecure’
While the push and pull of the USDA cuts are held up in court, food banks like those in Houston and Philadelphia continue to seek solutions, as do others. Celia Cole, chief executive officer of the nonprofit group Feeding Texas, said that one in six Texas families are food insecure.
“It’s a really significant problem that affects lots of Texans, and the rates of food insecurity are higher for families with kids,” Cole told Straight Arrow News.
In 2023, 13.5% of American households were food insecure. The rate for households with children was 17.9%, according to the USDA.
“Chances are, you do know someone who’s food insecure,” Cole said. She thinks if more people understood that, perhaps even more volunteers would pitch in at food banks across the nation.
That’s part of the lesson Kyla Raygor wanted her son Jackson to walk away with when they signed up for their volunteer shift at the Houston Food Bank. It was their first attempt at volunteering this summer, though Kyla said she hoped it wouldn’t be their last.
Jackson seemed to be on board.
“This place is amazing,” he said, sealing a bag of rice and sliding it down to the volunteer next to him for the next step in its journey toward the plate of a stranger – or perhaps a neighbor.
