Two weeks into Elsy Cipriani’s new job as executive director of the New Hampshire Food Bank, onboarding has not been easy. 

Earlier this month, the food bank lost nearly $1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement, which is designed to help food banks buy fresh foods from local growers. The program was, until now, administered locally through New Hampshire Feeding New Hampshire, and its untimely end cancels $420 million in funding for food banks nationwide.

In her 20 years of nonprofit work, most recently as the director of New Generation, an emergency shelter for women and children facing housing insecurity in the Seacoast, Cipriani said she has never seen such an abrupt change.

“It was a big surprise,” Cipriani said. “But, to be honest, we have been extremely cautious knowing that some changes and some potential cuts to funding are coming, especially anything coming from the federal government.”

In previous years, this funding had been a lifeline: The food bank received nearly $2 million from two federal programs to purchase fresh food locally between 2022 and 2025. In 2024 alone, the program enabled the New Hampshire Food Bank to purchase 522 pounds of goods from 185 local farmers, which in turn was distributed to 285 soup kitchens, food pantries, homeless shelters and other partner agencies working to combat hunger in New Hampshire.

Cipriani said Local Food Purchase Assistance funding helped the food bank build its internal capacity, purchase in bulk from local farmers, assist partner agencies with forward contracting and purchase culturally preferred foods for 18 partner agencies serving New Americans.

“This funding was crucial for us to be able to provide our partner agencies with access to produce protein and dairy from local farmers. We were being a bridge between nutritious foods and local communities,” she said.

In December, before the funding was axed, the New Hampshire Food Bank secured $967,00 through the next round of funding, which would have lasted from April 2025 through January 2028.

Now, the promise of that funding is off the table. Cipriani said the food bank will look to foundations and private donors for support, not only to alleviate the immediate shortfall of the federal funds but to strengthen the food bank’s safety net as it braces for the possibility of future cuts, including to the USDA’s Summer Food Service Program.

Children and schools are already being affected by cuts to another USDA program: Local Food for Schools, which, similarly provides funding for schools to purchase fresh produce directly from local farmers. Both programs were halted at the same time with a USDA representative telling CBS News that the agency is looking to “return to long-term, fiscally responsible initiatives.”

Local Food for Schools agreements would have totaled $660 million this year. All told, the sunsetting of both programs represents $1 billion of canceled funding.

Donna Reynolds, director of School Nutrition Services for Concord, said she doesn’t expect the cuts to affect Concord in a dramatic way because the city’s schools have never been over-reliant on federal funding in the first place.

“It won’t impact us as hugely as it would some other districts that do more local purchasing,” Reynolds said. “We’ve wanted to do more farms-to-school activities and more local purchasing, but it’s just it’s a little more difficult, it’s a little more time consuming.”

The district’s coffers still have about $10,000 remaining from previous rounds of Local Foods grants. While there’s uncertainty about what will happen to other federal programs, Reynolds remains confident the district’s current purchasing procedures will remain unaffected by USDA program cuts.

Concord schools have a contract with an Augusta-based distributor, Performance Food Group, and source local fruit, yogurt and some meats through a digital food hub, Food Connects.

REBECA PEREIRA can be reached at rpereira@cmonitor.com.