Now Everyone Does Food: A Reactionary Cash Grab When Lives Are at Stake

By Taylor Ryan, Executive Director and Founder of Change Today, Change Tomorrow

There is a special kind of exhaustion that comes from being right too early. Last year, Change Today, Change Tomorrow was in rooms across this city sounding the alarm: SNAP would fall, and when it did, it would not be a slow slide but a steep cliff. We tried to organize foundations, farmers, and partners to prepare for the moment the floor would drop out from under the families we serve.

People smiled politely. Some shrugged. Many could not imagine a government abandoning millions of people who rely on food assistance to simply survive.

Belief is a funny thing. It crumbles slow, then all at once.

The dam finally burst, and tomorrow SNAP falls. And suddenly everybody is in the food game.

Let me be honest: I do not celebrate this rush. It tastes sour. Because feeding people is not a trend. Food insecurity is not a branding opportunity. Hunger is not a polished press release or a convenient pivot when the winds shift.

We have been living this crisis in real time. It did not start this week. It did not begin when the news cameras finally noticed.

Do you know how hard it is to get funding for food? To convince funders that before you build programs, you must feed people? Before job training, before after-school support, before mental health services, before any vision for equity can get off the ground, people must eat. You cannot build power on an empty stomach. You cannot activate a community that has not eaten since yesterday.

Yet for years, we heard that food work was “too direct service,” “lacked innovation,” “didn’t scale,” as if scale matters when a child is hungry today. The stark truth is this: food is foundational. It is not glamorous. It will not make anyone a headline darling. It simply keeps people alive.

And here we are, on the eve of this SNAP collapse, watching the scramble. Suddenly, everyone runs to collect canned goods, rises in that neighborhood by 12%. — https://open.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3571… Meanwhile, since 2020, we have been on the ground with Feed the West, feeding families four days a week, running the only farmers market in the West End, building land with neighbors, purchasing from Black farmers, moving groceries like a heartbeat. We had nearly $2,000 in SNAP sales this market season alone.

And yet, here we sit, watching local news list organizations to support and somehow CTCT disappears from the narrative. We find out about SNAP response strategy meetings after they happen. The largest food bank in our own city refuses partnership. A Lexington organization was funded as a “Louisville anchor” while we are right here, anchored in community by roots and sweat and presence.

This is not about personal offense. This is about truth-telling. Lack of coordination, lack of political will, and lack of imagination is what keeps our communities hungry. We have lived through worst-case scenarios before and we learned that the only thing that keeps people alive is community-held infrastructure, not charity, not panic-funding, not press conferences and photo-ops.

We are doing the work that must be done, and we will continue to do it when the cameras turn away again. But we cannot do it alone.

Before I go further, let me be very clear about what this is not. This is not me criticizing neighbors, small businesses, churches, DJs, bartenders, AAU coaches, or aunties putting food on tables together. That is the soul of community and it has always saved us. Louisville is showing up for each other in living rooms, in church basements, in barbershops, at pop-ups and parties and toy drives and food drives. That is beautiful and necessary. This message is not for them. This is an institutional call-in. A call to philanthropy, to government, to corporate donors, to major nonprofits who only discover Black neighborhoods when crisis hits. All the mom-and-pop discount offers, freebies, food drives, and creative mutual aid moments matter deeply. We celebrate them. And we encourage anyone hosting an event in 2026 to consider CTCT as a food and funding partner. Thank you to those who already have, like Jessica Sayles BASSGIVING this November 26 at Headliners (https://www.tixr.com/…/bassgiving-7-w-austeria-162363) and That’s Crazy Camp’s toy-drive benefit concert on December 8. That is the blueprint. We honor it. We build with it. We are calling the institutions to match that spirit with the scale they claim to have.

The call is clear.

We need 500 people to commit to $100 a month. (https://secure.givelively.org/…/change-today-change…) Not a one-time crisis donation. A sustained commitment to the right to eat. A commitment to Black neighborhoods having more than crumbs. Join us virtually alongside the Kentucky Black Farmers Association Tuesdays at 10 AM EST if you want to get active. — https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event…

With this support, Feed the West will activate four more weekly food locations beyond Shawnee, Park Hill, Portland, and California Community Centers. On November 15, we begin rolling out our Neighborhood Skill Directory starting in the California neighborhood, where we have land co-designed and co-built with neighbors, where our farmers market lives, where our grocery share grows.

The truth is simple: people cannot wait for the government to remember them. They cannot wait for philanthropy to catch up. They cannot wait for institutions to decide hunger is worth seeing again.

We have a responsibility to build what we need.

Not reaction. Not charity.

Infrastructure. Community. Continuity.

History will remember who fed people when it mattered.

Louisville, stand with us. Because talking about food is easy. Feeding people takes commitment.

Reach out to me directly to get activated in your community.

— taylor@change-today.org

About the Author

Taylor Ryan is the Executive Director and Founder of Change Today, Change Tomorrow, a Louisville-grown organization building community-owned solutions to food access, land, education, and public health. She is a Louisville Business First Top 20 People to Know honoree and a Forty Under 40 recipient. Taylor is a graduate of the LISC Emerging Developers Program and currently participates in Common Ground’s Operations Cohort, continuing her work to build lasting community infrastructure in the West End.

Beyond titles, Taylor is a mother, a PTA board member, and a woman who shows up with both her voice and her resources. She is a monthly donor to ten Black-led organizations in Louisville, living her belief that mutual uplift is how we build power and care for one another. Her work is rooted in love, strategy, and a deep commitment to a future where community needs are not a crisis response, but a shared daily practice.