Students at Wendover High School spent Thursday packing 90 boxes of meat, fruit, vegetables and other groceries, kicking off a new statewide effort to get food to Utah communities that traditional assistance programs often miss. The boxes were headed to 90 families in Wendover, a town of about 1,130 people near the Nevada border, marking the first event of a community-based food security network built by a nonprofit and a state lawmaker.
The network was launched by Chicanos por la Causa, a community development nonprofit, alongside Utah Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, a Democrat from Salt Lake City, according to Utah News Dispatch. Leo Gonzalez, program manager at Chicanos por la Causa, said food security ranks among Utahns' top needs alongside housing and healthcare. “We're feeding 90 different families here in Wendover,” Gonzalez said, as reported by Fox 13.
Organizers say the goal is far bigger than one border town. Gonzalez described plans to eventually take food to every single county in Utah, with early priorities including the west side of Salt Lake City and rural stretches of Tooele, Summit, Carbon and Sanpete counties, the same report notes. Wendover itself was chosen specifically because it represents the kind of community traditional food assistance programs can struggle to reach.
How the Network Sources Its Food
Rather than simply distributing surplus goods, the network's model is built around buying directly from local producers and routing that food to families through trusted community organizations, according to a release from Utah Policy. Listed food providers include Utah Natural Meat, International Rescue Committee New Roots, OakDell Egg Farms and Utah Refugee Goats, with other organizations helping distribute the food once it reaches communities.
Financial backing for the effort comes from private-sector donors. Utah News Dispatch lists the Larry H. Miller Foundation, Mountain America Credit Union, Marathon Petroleum and the Brent and Kathryn Wood Foundation as supporters, while Fox 13 identifies the same philanthropic entity as the Larry H. & Gail Miller Family Foundation alongside the other three donors.
A Statewide Hunger Problem That Keeps Growing
The launch comes as hunger numbers in Utah have climbed sharply. The Utah Food Bank reported that 445,000 Utahns, including one in five children, were experiencing food insecurity as of January, an increase of nearly 100,000 people in a single year. The organization also notes that nearly half of those experiencing food insecurity do not qualify for federal assistance, a gap the new network is explicitly designed to fill.
Escamilla, who has sponsored food security legislation for several years, said children are going hungry in Utah and that the number keeps growing. She expects child food insecurity to worsen as safety-net programs face further cuts, a concern that tracks with federal trends. Utah News Dispatch reports that more than 5 million people nationwide, including almost 29,000 Utahns, have lost access to SNAP, citing figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Those federal numbers are stark on their own. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates SNAP participation nationwide fell by 5.5 million people, or 13 percent, between the law's enactment in July 2025 and July 2026. In the 28 states with available data, the organization also found that the number of children receiving SNAP fell by 1.5 million over roughly the same period.
Legislative Push Looms for Next Session
Escamilla is expected to propose a bill for the third consecutive year that would expand free school lunch to more K-12 students, saying the measure would first guarantee free lunch to children under 200 percent of the poverty level. A separate 2025 measure, Utah H.B. 100, would establish a program to provide lunch at no cost to an eligible student, according to the Utah Legislature.
She is also seeking appropriations to better support Utah State University's Food Security Council and statute modifications that would let the council directly connect people with services. Escamilla said she is more hopeful about passing future bills addressing food insecurity after Democrats are projected to flip some seats in the Utah Legislature.
Back in Wendover, the scale of need is already visible in food bank data. The Utah Food Bank reported that its pantries served 52,000 more people in October 2025 than in September, and that mobile pantry visits in November jumped an average of 35 percent over October, with some locations seeing increases of 80 to 90 percent. For a network that just packed its first 90 boxes, that surge underscores how much ground organizers hope to cover as they push the effort toward every corner of the state, as Utah News Dispatch first reported and Utah Public Radio later republished.
