Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Staff Photographer

Food assistance organizations in New Haven are seeking nearly a million dollars in city funds next year for services that have been threatened by President Donald Trump’s spending cuts.

Leaders and advocates representing the city’s food banks and soup kitchens made the request during a Board of Alders budget workshop Wednesday evening in City Hall. The organizations have begun to experience the fallout from reductions in federal food assistance spending.

“There’s a perception that the community will take care of itself when it comes to food assistance, and that’s just not the reality,” Steve Werlin, the executive director of the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, told the News.

The food kitchen has recently received less food than normal from the Connecticut Foodshare, which depends partly on federal money, Werlin said. He expects DESK’s stockpile of food to dwindle “at some point in the next few months” without a new source of funding.

Alycia Santilli — co-chair of the Coordinated Food Assistance Network, or CFAN, the coalition that made the proposal — told the Finance Committee that 27 percent of New Haven residents currently face food insecurity, compared with 18 percent statewide. She added that nearly two-fifths of Elm City residents reported receiving groceries or meals from food assistance providers.

Coalition members developed their “legislative agenda,” totaling $993,000, before the 2024 election, Werlin said. They presented it to New Haven community services officials in the winter as Mayor Justin Elicker was preparing his budget proposal.

Elicker announced his $703.7 million budget proposal for the 2025-26 fiscal year in late February, saying he took a “primarily status quo” approach amid the unpredictability of the Trump administration’s funding for local programs. The proposal did not include CFAN’s proposed spending.

Werlin and Santilli both said they hoped alders would be sympathetic to their requests in the wake of the Trump administration’s cuts. They stressed that the city has not usually provided regular funding for food assistance.

 “I know that a lot of alders really care about this issue,” Santilli said, “and they probably weren’t fully aware that the city doesn’t really spend money in this way.”

Elicker said Thursday in a statement provided by his spokesperson that he has proposed directing almost $150,000 in federal Community Block Development Grant money to food assistance organizations, including $35,000 for DESK.

He also said the city planned to allocate about $890,000 from two federal grants to Haven’s Harvest, a nonprofit focused on reducing food waste — but that the grants are now frozen.

“The cuts by the Trump administration to food banks and meals programs are devastating,” Elicker said in the statement. “We would always like to do more, but we can’t make up the difference from the federal government.”

About a dozen food assistance advocates attended Wednesday’s aldermanic meeting. Four of them testified directly to the alders, and some held signs saying, “FOOD IS A HUMAN RIGHT” or “Hungry for Change!”

Alder Anna Festa of East Rock’s Ward 10 said alders face a difficult balancing act as they refine the mayor’s proposed budget.

“It’s going to be some very difficult decisions, because if we contribute to every little thing, every nonprofit that’s not getting aid, that cuts into the budget, which means higher taxes for the residents, which means for some of those folks, they’ll now have to decide themselves if they need to go to the food pantry or not,” Festa said.

New Haven has over 50 food pantries and soup kitchens, Santilli told the alders.