ATHOL – As the North Central Massachusetts Association of Realtors plans a food drive this Saturday, the local food pantry is seeing supplies getting tighter.

The association will hold a “Fill-a-Cruiser” food collection on May 3, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Market Basket at North Quabbin Commons in Athol.

Area residents are urged to contribute non-perishable food items, with a goal of filling an Athol Police Department cruisers. Food collected will be split between the Community Pantry at Athol High School and the Templeton Food Pantry.

April Cover, chair of the association’s Community Involvement Committee, told the Athol Daily News, “We do all sorts of things in the community, and that’s our way of giving back. We’ve done Fill-a-Cruiser events for several years now.”

Cover pointed out that, in addition to Athol, food collections will take place this Saturday in Leominster and Fitchburg.

According to Community Pantry Director Shirley Mitchell, the food collected this Saturday will certainly help. The pantry gets the bulk of its stock from the Worcester County Food Pantry, according to Mitchell, though donations are always appreciated. The supplies, she said, are getting noticeably tighter.

“In the past, when the pantry first started,” she said, “I was going down (to the Worcester pantry) during Covid and the food bank was like, ‘Take what you need. Take what you’re giving out.’ It seems now that they’re saying, ‘Your pantry can only get this allotment of, say, this many cases of peanut butter. You’ve already met your capacity.’ We’re seeing that more often.”

Mitchell said demand for the pantry’s services, which varies from week to week, remains high. That can be seen when the pantry, which is open from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. every Wednesday, closes for the week.

“I’ve never seen us get down to only eight jars of peanut butter…ever,” said Mitchell recently. “We were able to go get some more, but I truly have never seen our shelves like that.”

Mitchell said it appears the Worcester Food Bank “is just being mindful now of what they have and what they can distribute. For us, we have this continuous conversation where we can only give what we have. There’s nothing more that we can do.”

Worcester Food Bank CEO Jean McMurray said the food bank hasn’t yet been affected by Trump administration cuts, but the organization is taking steps to minimize any potential impact.

In late March, the United States Department of Agriculture Northeast Regional Office confirmed that Massachusetts’ $3.4 million allocation from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) Commodity Credit Corporation bonus food order had been canceled, according to information provided by the state. That funding would have provided 121,830 cases of pre-selected food items such as eggs, chicken, milk, fruit, pasta, beans and salmon to Massachusetts food banks to help feed residents.

The Worcester County Food Bank’s share of the TEFAP funding amounted to $307,000.

“What that translated to was the cancellation of 17 deliveries for the Worcester County Food Bank,” said McMurray. “Those deliveries were scheduled for May through August. So, we haven’t seen an impact…yet.”

McMurray said the food bank did some contingency planning last fall, “as we always do when there’s any external situations or the environment can be changing. So, we had an election in November and we did some contingency planning around that and set aside funds so if we had to purchase food, we could do that. Because all the food we distribute is all donated

“When people donate financially to the food bank, that funding is used to keep our trucks on the road – we have to pay our utility bills, our salaries. So, once we were notified of the cancellation of those deliveries – that was on March 25 – the board of directors said, ‘Okay, we have that money set aside.’ So, the Worcester County Food Bank is purchasing food to try to offset those cancellations.”

In all, said McMurray, the food bank is spending roughly $475,000 to make up for the loss of those deliveries.

“We’re very concerned about the cuts, the ones that directly impact us, like the ones canceling deliveries of food,” McMurray said. “We’re also very concerned about any other cuts that have happened or could happen because there’s an indirect impact on the food bank. Whether it’s SNAP benefits, or if funding goes away to help people – like fuel assistance – any time there’s a cut to a program that benefits people, we see that ripple effect.”

Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com.