Survey Finds Majority of Virginia Families With Children Face Food Insecurity

A new statewide survey commissioned after the federal government stopped publishing its long-running hunger study finds that 51 percent of Virginia families with children are food insecure, a figure that food-bank leaders say matches what they see every week in donation centers and pantry lines.

The Federation of Virginia Food Banks, the Virginia Department of Social Services and No Kid Hungry Virginia sponsored the survey, which was conducted by an independent University of Chicago research organization with support from Virginia Tech. About 5,600 Virginians participated. The effort is designed to replace practical planning data that earlier came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual food-security survey, which ended in 2025 after nearly three decades.

That final federal survey reported that 42 percent of Virginia respondents were food insecure over the prior year. The new state findings show an even sharper squeeze among households raising children, a group that drives school meal demand, pediatric clinic caseloads and weekend backpack programs.

Food-bank managers say hunger has climbed since last year while donations have narrowed. Eddie Oliver, director of the Federation of Virginia Food Banks, told the Virginia Mercury that annual data helps the network’s roughly 1,100 partner agencies target scarce resources to places with the deepest need. More people are relying on those partners amid inflation, he said, with notable spikes during last fall’s government shutdown and congressional fights over the H.R. 1 spending package that rewrote federal food-assistance rules.

“Too often, food is the thing that gets sacrificed because you have to pay your rent, or you get evicted, you have to make your car payment, or you lose your car,” Oliver said. Families coping with tight budgets often skip meals or buy cheaper, less nutritious food, he added — patterns pantry workers describe as increasingly common.

In Southside Virginia, Jackie Green-August of the Total Life Center in Nottoway County said most pantry visitors are coming more often even as donations shrink. Roughly 18.5 percent of Nottoway’s about 15,500 residents live below the poverty line. She described neighbors juggling rent, utilities, groceries and medicine, including a former client who quit the pantry after landing a job only to return within two months because wages still did not stretch.

Survey respondents put grocery inflation at the center of the squeeze: 87 percent said higher-than-usual food prices are causing strain. Over the past year more than 100,000 Virginians have lost SNAP benefits under the changed federal rules. Able-bodied adults must meet new work or volunteer criteria to keep benefits — a bar Green-August said is harder to clear in rural counties where transportation costs were already high before fuel prices jumped.

Virginia Department of Social Services Commissioner Duke Storen said the study underscores what is at stake. Food access shapes chronic-disease prevention and management; the survey found that three of four food-insecure adults have been diagnosed with one or more chronic conditions, and three in five visited an emergency room or urgent-care facility at least once in the past year.

Storen linked the findings to Governor Abigail Spanberger’s push to keep eligible Virginians enrolled in benefits, including Medicaid. H.R. 1 also places hundreds of thousands of Virginians at risk of losing health coverage next year, with thousands of lawful immigrants facing near-term cuts. Spanberger has signed an executive order aimed at tightening inter-agency compliance work so eligible people are not dropped through paperwork gaps.

For local governments, the survey is both a social-services dashboard and a budget warning. School divisions already stretch free and reduced-price meal programs; rising household insecurity typically shows up as higher summer meal participation, more weekend food backpacks and heavier pressure on community foundations. Counties with thin nonprofit capacity — especially rural Southside and Southwest — may need clearer partnerships with regional food banks rather than one-off holiday drives.

Public-health agencies will watch whether emergency-room use tied to food insecurity translates into avoidable Medicaid costs. Behavioral-health and diabetes-management programs often fail when patients cannot keep a stable diet. That is why pantry directors talk about communications with local boards of supervisors as operational survival, not politics: Green-August said her pantry’s building was once up for sale until visitors pressed local officials to keep the site available.

Statewide, the end of the USDA survey forced Virginia to build its own evidence base. Trump administration officials had called the federal survey redundant and politicized; Virginia agencies countered that without regular measurement, grant targeting and legislative oversight become guesswork. The Chicago-led sample of 5,600 residents is large enough to support regional comparisons that smaller nonprofit polls cannot.

Advocates will press the General Assembly for complementary steps: stronger school meal funding, transportation supports that make SNAP work requirements realistic in rural areas, and clearer notice when households lose benefits. Opponents of expanded state spending will argue that private charity and workforce participation remain the better long-term path and that federal rule changes were meant to curb improper payments.

Either way, the operational message for September 2026 is concrete. More than half of surveyed Virginia families with children report food insecurity; food banks say demand is up and donations are down; and state social-services leaders say the data should guide enrollment protection and pantry partnerships before winter heating bills compound grocery costs.

Residents looking for help can start with local food-bank partner directories and DSS benefit portals. Local elected officials can ask for locality-level cutouts from the new survey as they set FY2027 human-services budgets. The survey does not invent hunger — it measures it after Washington stopped publishing the old yardstick — and Virginia’s numbers now put a majority of families with children on the insecure side of the line.