Nationwide, roughly 22% of the LGBTQ+ community is food insecure. In Arizona, the data doesn’t really exist — at least not yet. The Arizona Food Bank Network is now surveying this population to find out just how big a problem hunger is among them.
Terri Shoemaker is the executive vice president at the Arizona Food Bank Network.
"We know that hunger really lives specifically in certain areas and in certain groups of people, and we had heard anecdotally for a long time that hunger was especially a problem in the LGBTQ+ community," Shoemaker said.
So, they set out to learn more.
"And we found that there wasn't a lot of data for the state of Arizona and that prompted a study that's going on now in the form of a survey and focus groups to get at, not just what does hunger look like in that population in Arizona, but what are some of the things that we might be able to do about that eventually."
Isabel Loga is the network’s program manager.
She says they’ve hosted two focus groups: one with people 18 to 24 years old, the other with older adults.
"So our senior population, we did find a lot of conversation that went into … mostly surrounding the cost of food and the struggles with that, balancing things like Social Security, SNAP benefits, a lot of conversation also went into health care," Loga said.
The survey closes in December, and Loga says they will issue a report in the new year. To take the survey, visit bit.ly/LGBTQIA2S-Survey.
