Thanks to some creative thinking from a town employee, two Orange food pantries are getting a much-needed funding boost as they work to address growing food insecurity in the area.
During an Orange Town Council work session on Monday, Aug. 3, Town Finance Director Dianna Gomez presented Council with a proposal to appropriate an additional $10,000 for each of the two food pantries located within the Town of Orange, Good Samaritan and Love Outreach Food Pantry.
The pantries had previously been allotted $6,000 apiece, bringing the total contribution from the town to each organization to $16,000 for the town’s fiscal year 2027, which runs from July 1, 2026 to June 31, 2027.
Gomez said that the impetus for increasing the food pantry funding came from a seemingly unrelated funding item, a Community Project Funding grant to modernize the town’s water treatment process, secured in early 2026 by District 7 Rep. Eugene Vindman.
The town was originally supposed to be responsible for $200,000 of the project under a cost-share requirement for the funding, but received an EPA waiver for its portion under a set of criteria meant to help underserved communities. If all goes according to plan, that means the town will only need to spend $1.5 million over the course of the water treatment project, versus the $1.7 million it had originally budgeted.
With 14.8% of households in the Town of Orange receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) benefits according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the town easily surpassed the 11.7% threshold for the waiver. (It’s also significantly higher than the state average of 9.1%, and Orange has an unusually high proportion of those households, 67.7%, that include children.)
Take action
Where to go if you need food in Orange
Good Samaritan and Love Outreach are two options located within the Town of Orange for community members facing food insecurity. Here’s where and when to go:
Good Samaritan: Thursdays from noon to 6 p.m. and Fridays from noon to 3 p.m. at 105 N. Madison Road, Orange. Learn more here, email info[AT]goodsamaritaninc[DOT]org or call (540) 840-0722.
Love Outreach: Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to noon and the third Monday of each month from 5 to 7 p.m. at 252 Blue Ridge Drive, Orange. Learn more here, email loveoutreachorange[AT]gmail[DOT]com or call (540) 308-7352.
Having those statistics, and knowing that the town was receiving the waiver in part due to the severity of food insecurity among its residents, Gomez said she felt it was the right thing to do to reinvest some of that money into the organizations helping to feed Orange community members. Although the town will wait until it is further along in the water treatment project — in case of any unforeseen circumstances — to decide to commit the unspent money to other areas of the budget, helping the food pantries could be done right away, Gomez told Charlottesville Tomorrow.
In total, it took the four council members present less than five minutes to hear the presentation by Gomez and to unanimously vote to approve the spending on Aug. 3, with Mayor Harrison Cluff ending the roll call with “a very enthusiastic aye.”
When Charlottesville Tomorrow reached out to Gomez on Aug. 18, the day after the town had presented representatives of the two organizations with checks for the extra funding, she was realistic about the severity of the growing food insecurity crisis and was “not sure how far the money will go.”
“To be honest with you, I was thinking, that’s great that we got the $10,000 apiece, but then my thought was, they need more and I should probably keep my eye out for anything else I can figure out to do for them,” Gomez said.
The $20,000 is a one-time appropriation. However, when the time comes to develop next year’s budget, Gomez said she plans to advocate for keeping the town’s contributions to the food pantries at or above the $16,000 each pantry received this year.
Gomez hopes to more aggressively pursue opportunities for grants that were previously underutilized by the town, similar to her proposal for funding the food pantries after the waiver for the water treatment project.
In the last few years, Gomez was successful in securing a few million dollars in grants for everything from water treatment to benches, freeing up more money for community organizations and services without going into additional debt or increasing the tax burden on residents.
“The focus has been not to take money from the town but to find other sources of money,” Gomez said.
When Charlottesville Tomorrow visited both Love Outreach and Good Samaritan in the weeks following Town Council’s vote, the takeaway was the same: the extra funding will provide the food pantries with financial breathing room in a year when their services are needed more than ever.
Laurie Herndon, a board member and office manager at Love Outreach Food Pantry, said that the number of clients Love Outreach serves has been steadily increasing for several years. In 2026, the food pantry has served an average of 1,000 people per month. Herndon said that several factors, from the rising cost of living to growing awareness of the organization, have played a part.
“Of course, the economy — that’s a biggie right there,” Herndon said. “And unfortunately, a little bit of it is that not everybody knows we’re here. I’ll talk to people that have lived in Orange all their lives and they say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know y’all were here,’ and we’ve been here since 1983. So, we’d like to get the word out that we’re here to help.”
Herndon said that the extra funding will allow Love Outreach to purchase turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and to make sure that the organization can offer a wider variety of items the rest of the time.
“We’re able to give out more eggs than what we were previously able to do,” she said. “When we’re able, we like to be able to do cheeses or margarines — things you usually wouldn’t think about in a food pantry because you normally think about a lot of cans. We try to have milk for everyone. Those are things we used to not be able to do that now we are.”
More than anything, Herndon said, the unexpected boost in funding will provide some peace of mind in the midst of a challenging year.
“First of all, it’s just, oh goodness, we won’t have to sweat it out that we’ll have enough to cover everything.”
Good Samaritan, another volunteer-run food pantry which has been operating in Orange since 2014, has seen a massive increase in clients over the last three years, Program Director Valencia Bailey told Charlottesville Tomorrow. In 2024, Good Samaritan served about 7,500 clients; in 2025, that number jumped to 10,000. As of Aug.14, the organization had already seen more than 9,000 clients in 2026, and is anticipating as many as 12,000 by the end of the year.
In response to the growing demand, both organizations have increased the number of times clients can visit their food pantries each month, and Good Samaritan has extended its operating hours.
Tightening regulations on SNAP have also strained food safety nets over the last year, as Axios reports. At the same time, federal spending cuts have left regional food banks, and the local food pantries they distribute to, having to purchase items they used to receive for free.
“We have seen an influx because people are really struggling to make ends meet,” Bailey said. “Right now, the high cost of food, the high cost of gas, living expenses — everything has contributed because now we have more people depending on us to feed their families. It truly has been hard for us, and we’ve recently also taken on the backpack program for the schools.”
“The backpack program” is Feeding OC, a program that provides OCPS students with shelf-stable food to take home. Good Samaritan currently leads the effort at Orange County High School and has filled more than 1,200 cinch bags with staples like peanut butter and cereal bars.
“The motivation behind that is that when children are hungry, they can’t learn,” Bailey said. “Their attention span is not there. So, by providing them food, sustaining them, they are more able to learn and concentrate. Anything Good Samaritan can do to help our community, we’re willing to do it.”
Bailey said that the extra funding from the town was an “answer to prayer” that will help not just with the backpack program, but with other projects like meal boxes Good Samaritan provides for seniors.
“We have a lot of senior citizens that come in and they don’t have enough money,” Bailey said. “They have to choose between having medication or eating. I can now with that $10,000 make sure we have enough juice, applesauce, different things that they need to take their medication with.”
It’s a lot of programs to take on, but without organizations like Good Samaritan, Love Outreach and others, community members may not get the help they need at all. In smaller, rural communities, local governments are less likely to offer support to the organizations that provide food, housing and other necessities for their community members. In Orange for example, although the town provides contributions to its food pantries, the county government does not.
That means community and faith-based organizations often step up to care for vulnerable residents largely on their own, while taking on a wide variety of initiatives.
That’s definitely true in Orange. In addition to their food pantries, both Love Outreach and Good Samaritan run clothes closets where adults and children can get items they need like winter coats and shoes. This Saturday, August 22, Good Samaritan will be handing out free school supplies and on Sept. 5, they’ll be hosting a comedy benefit at Horton Vineyards to raise funds for the organization’s next major project — A Place of Rest, a shelter for women and children. (You can learn more about those events here.)
It also means that when an organization like Good Samaritan or Love Outreach does receive an unexpected boost, it can make a big difference. Bailey said that despite the challenges facing her food pantry and others, she has no intentions of slowing down.
“I’ve experienced parents coming in with kids hungry, and that should never be. I believe that we were actually planted here for this purpose, for such a time as this, and I’m excited to see what we’ll be next year.”
