Support SB1369 to help Arizona's food banks
SB1369 (Sen. Kerr) will be heard in the Senate Appropriations Committee today (Tues., Feb. 8 at 2pm). It requests an ongoing appropriation of an additional $1 million for the Coordinated Hunger Services line item in DES’s budget, which helps support Arizona’s food banks and partner agencies to safely store, transport, and distribute food across the state.
Prior to the pandemic, Arizona’s statewide network of 5 regional food banks and 1,000 partner agencies (i.e., community centers, senior centers, homeless shelters, church pantries, and other direct service providers) were serving more than 450,000 Arizonans each month. During the pandemic, Arizona has seen surges of twice that many people needing emergency food assistance. While demand has increased by nearly 50 percent over the past 15 years (not including COVID spikes), state funding has remained static. See fact sheet below.
Please sign on in support of the bill! If you have an account with the AZ Legislature’s Request-to-Speak (RTS) system, the steps to sign-on in support are below. If you don’t have an RTS account, you can sign up for one here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RTS-Arizona.
How to support our bill through the Request-to-Speak System
Sign into your RTS account at this link: https://apps.azleg.gov/Account/SignOn and click "Request to Speak."
Click on the "New Request" tab on the left.
In the “Search Phrase” bar, type SB1369, then hit search.
The bill should appear below: “SB1369 - appropriations; coordinated hunger services”
Click the blue "Add request" tab on the right.
FINALLY, you'll be able to click the green thumbs up button to indicate you are "for" the bill – hooray!
Select “No,” you do not wish to speak to the committee directly. You may add publicly-visible comments in the box if you wish, but it's not required.
Click submit and you're done.
THANK YOU!