Background Statement
Aurora Interfaith Community Services (Aurora Interfaith) was founded in 1968 in response to a need for coordinated emergency assistance for residents of Aurora, Colorado. Over the past 54 years, Aurora Interfaith’s programs and services have grown in response to the community’s needs. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Aurora, Aurora Interfaith worked quickly with the City of Aurora to launch a new mobile food pantry program to increase our food pantry resources as well as to make food assistance more accessible for community members in need. Aurora Interfaith acquired a box truck for the mobile pantry program in 2021, ensuring that the program will be sustainable throughout the pandemic recovery and beyond. Aurora Interfaith provides wraparound services and constantly works to improve and adapt programs to best meet the community’s needs, never charging any fees.
There has been a great need for Aurora Interfaith’s programs in Aurora since long before COVID-19, but the pandemic has made our work more essential and urgent than ever before. In 2019, pre-pandemic, Hunger Free Colorado reported that one in eleven Coloradans (9%) needed food assistance. In 2020, that rate grew to two in five (40%). In 2021, the rate was a still-elevated one in three (33%). Aurora Interfaith has seen this change firsthand. In 2020, Aurora Interfaith accommodated nearly six times as many client visits and served nearly twice as many clients as in 2019. We continued to see increased needs in 2021, accommodating over 2.5 times as many client visits and serving over twice as many clients as we did pre-pandemic. We initially expected to deliver similar service levels this year (2022), but with record inflation and the continued disruption of new COVID-19 variants, the number of Aurora community members seeking food assistance and other support at Aurora Interfaith has been rising in recent months and we now expect to surpass last year’s service numbers. We expect the effects of the pandemic to be felt by the community for years to come, and we plan to serve the community throughout this recovery and beyond.