For an hour last Tuesday, Wes Keyes gave me a tour of Brother Bill’s Helping Hand in West Dallas — every inch of it, too, from the overcrowded office spaces to the food pantry’s walk-in freezer and refrigerator to the treatment rooms in the clinic where touch-screens advise patients on the causes of hypertension and treatments for diabetes. And when we were done, Keyes suggested I come back the next morning, when the pantry opened its doors to its hungry neighbors for whom grocery stores are more rumor than reality.

“And remember, we call them neighbors,” Keyes said. “Not clients.”

I asked Keyes if the waiting room, lined with chairs empty on a Tuesday afternoon, would be crowded.

“Oh, yeah,” said Keyes, the CEO here since May 2017. “You won’t be able to find a parking space, in the lot or near the building.”

He said there would be 200 families lined up on Wednesday, another 200 on Thursday and 300 on Friday. That didn’t include its handful of other locations, in West Dallas and along Bexar Street in South Dallas.

Keyes told me the number of neighbors in need has risen — yet again, one more year-over-year, over-and-over-and-over increase. Keyes said Brother Bill’s distributed 1.3 million meals in 2020. Last year, that number rose to 2.77 million meals.

“And we’re already up 22% this year in the number of meals served over this time last year,” he said. He looked down for a moment and shook his head. “We’re also up 30% in the number of people needing meals.”

Which means, for those bad at math, “there are more people coming to get fewer items,” he said.

Every chair occupied

Keyes was right. A little after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, cars spilled out of the Brother Bill’s lot onto Westmoreland Road. Families parked in mud along Angelina Drive. Every chair in the lobby was occupied by families, parents and little kids, who’d filled out pink appointment cards that allowed them entry into the pantry.

Dozens of volunteers helped hundreds of people fill bags and grocery carts with canned goods, fresh produce, boxes of noodles, star-spangled cupcakes left over from July 4, even peaches and basil grown in the Brother Bill’s community gardens nearby.

Later, I asked Keyes if he’s ever worried that there might come a day when the pantry’s bare. He told me that’s happened before, during the pandemic in 2020.

“And that feeling was gut-wrenching, and I don’t want to feel that again,” he said. “However, something’s gotta give, and I feel like if it doesn’t give soon ...” He paused. “We’re burning people out, too. I’ve never lost as many employees as I have in the last month — six or seven. They can’t afford to work here. And there are so many people coming in the door.

“So I’m worried about the food, yes, and who’s going to give it out.”

According to the North Texas Food Bank, which counts Brother Bill’s among its numerous partner agencies, more than 1.3 million Dallas-Fort Worth residents don’t know where their next meal will come from, an uptick of 140,000 over 2024. Some 441,000 of those are children; some 239,000 more are elderly. The NTFB distributed 137 million meals in 2024 — 35 million more than in 2020, when, during the pandemic, lines of cars snaked for miles around Fair Park.

And it’s only going to get worse: Shortly after Donald Trump took office again, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut $1 billion worth of programs that allowed food banks and schools to buy from local farmers and ranchers. The North Texas Food Bank was counting on some $9 million that never arrived. The death of another USDA program that allowed food banks to buy directly from the government cost the food bank another $2 million, at least, said Trisha Cunningham, the NTFB’s president and CEO.

And then came the death blow: The budget bill championed by Republicans and signed last week by Trump will eliminate $186 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the next decade, pushing the burden to states — many of which will be unwilling or unable to cover the deficit. Like, say, Texas, one of the few states in the union unwilling even to feed hungry children during the summer.

That loss of SNAP money, Cunningham told me earlier this week, will not only impact our hungry neighbors, but also the grocers and big boxes who rely on those federal food dollars to justify going into lower-income neighborhoods. Those who spend their days trying to feed the famished fret that the bill will provide retailers with one more reason to avoid opening doors in food deserts.

That lost $186 billion, Cunningham said, “would have equated to about 6 billion meals across the country.”

That number comes from Feeding America, which calls the legislation “a significant setback for people and communities facing hunger.” Says one expert on public benefits, it marks “the largest cut to food assistance in history.”

Feeding America, of which the NTFB is a partner agency, has long maintained that “hunger is a nonpartisan issue that impacts us all.” It was supposed to be one of the few things we all agreed on, that we didn’t want to see our neighbors starve.

It’s a bar so low you could trip over it.

The main course

Yet, now, mercilessness has become the main course. Which leaves food bank leaders like Cunningham confused, heartbroken, angry — “flabbergasted,” as she put it when we spoke this week. More than once her eyes turned red and filled with tears.

“I think it’s turned away from people to politics, and that’s what I think is so disheartening to me,” she said across a conference table at the NTFB’s Plano headquarters. “I will say that the day the bill got officially through the House, I felt defeated. ... It’s been Whac-A-Mole ever since January, because we never know what’s coming up. What I’ve told our team is, our neighbors need us now more than ever, and our job is more important now than ever. We have resilience. But I talked to my fellow CEOs across the Feeding America network, many of them much longer tenured than me, and they said, ‘We’ve never seen this.’”

The NTFB recently completed its $500 million Nourish North Texas capital campaign. In April, it rolled out its new strategic plan. And now all of that’s in danger and in doubt.

“Now,” Cunningham, “I feel like we’re fighting to be able to have the resources that we need in order to be able to meet the food needs.”

“I am worried about it,” Keyes told me last week. “But we have to keep showing up, keep fighting, keep going down to Austin.”

For as much good as that will do. Keyes was down there on April 2 along with representatives from food banks and pantries across the state. They were invited to attend Texas Food Bank Day, as declared by Senate Resolution 352, which commended Feeding Texas for “reducing hunger while contributing greatly to the health and well-being of the people of the Lone Star State.” Keyes recalled the warm reception from both sides of the aisle.

Eighty days later, Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer program, which was approved by the state Legislature and would have helped low-income families pay for groceries over the summer — when their children aren’t getting fed at school.

The program would have given families $120 for each eligible child. It would have cost an estimated $60 million.

The state’s entire budget is $338 billion.

In my notepad, I circled something Keyes told me when I walked out of Brother Bill’s last week:

“If we lose the ability to take care of the least of them, as Jesus said, we will be cast into hellfire.”

Maybe that’s not the heat of summertime we’re beginning to feel.

Robert Wilonsky is editorial columnist for The Dallas Morning News.