Northern Tier
Community Hunger Mapping
Community Hunger Mapping
According to Feeding America’s most recent localized food insecurity estimates, one in seven residents (14.4%) of the six-county region comprised of Bradford, Clinton, Lycoming, Potter, Sullivan, and Tioga counties experienced food insecurity. As of 2023, almost 40,000 people in the Northern Tier, including more than 11,000 children and youth under the age of 18, were unsure where their next meal would come from. Food insecurity is not evenly distributed across the region; although it burdens residents of every county, municipality, and neighborhood within the Northern Tier, the exact weight of that burden varies based on demographic characteristics, geography, and many other economic and social factors.
This Community Hunger Mapping Report aims to shine a light on the dispersion, experience, and causes of food insecurity throughout the Northern Tier region via the use of community-engaged research methods. Importantly, the perspectives of food insecure neighbors were collected through surveys conducted on-site at food pantries as well as at other community resource locations. Throughout the project, the research team sought to depict the food insecurity landscape, the charitable food system’s response to it, and the experiences of food pantry visitors with the detail, nuance, and compassion they deserve.
The views of the pantry staff and volunteers who serve our neighbors in need every day were included via listening sessions and surveys, and researchers visited pantries that did not host surveys to collect additional observational data about the charitable food system in the Northern Tier. Beyond this, quantitative analysis of a variety of data sets available from sources including but not limited to the United States Department of Agriculture, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank’s own agency records, provide important perspective and context to the qualitative data. Used together, these mixed methods allow the final report to paint a vibrant picture of the Northern Tier’s charitable food system.
This final report strives to do more than simply provide information about food insecurity throughout the Northern Tier; it also seeks to make change for the neighbors who experience it. In the short term, goals include meaningful and lasting improvements in the experiences of food insecure neighbors, while in the long term, the end goal is to make substantive progress toward the elimination of hunger altogether. To meet this end, this report contains a number of specific, actionable recommendations for food pantries, human services organizations, government, health systems, and other stakeholders that, if collectively and collaboratively implemented, can help us build a north central Pennsylvania where no one goes hungry.
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Approach 1: Strengthening and Increasing the Accessibility of the Charitable Food System
The charitable food system in the Northern Tier region significantly reduces experiences of hunger. More specifically, rates of very low food security are 36% lower among households with incomes below 150% of the federal poverty level who visit charitable food providers an average of more than once per month in the last year compared to those that visited food pantries less than once per month. Importantly, the impact of the charitable food network is the greatest for households with children, the most vulnerable households in the region. Very low food security rates are 17 percentage points lower for households with children who visit pantries more frequently, while senior households see a much smaller drop of two percentage points.
Unfortunately, households with children are far less likely than senior households to visit food pantries often; just 24% of households with children averaged more than one pantry visit per month in the last year, compared to 40% of senior households. This difference is likely due in part to pantry opening hours, which are often only open during daytime hours and are therefore less accessible to working-age households with children.
Several attributes of the Northern Tier’s charitable food network are critical strengths that contribute to its hunger-fighting impact. Most people report receiving food they “often” or “always” like when they visit food pantries in the region. Pantry coordinators work hard to tailor the services they provide to their neighbors, often stepping up in a variety of ways when few other services are available. Importantly, intake processes are generally very low barrier and efficient, meaning that people can usually access the help they need with minimal red tape. Relatedly, reported experiences of judgment are low among pantry visitors at just 4.2%, which is among the lowest of any Community Hunger Mapping project yet completed
Approach 1.1: Increase consistent geographic access to food distributions.
The Northern Tier region’s geography is vast, covering an area slightly larger than the state of Connecticut. Although almost nine in ten (88%) Northern Tier residents can visit a food pantry with consistent distribution hours within a 15-minute drive, sizable geographic access gaps remain. Areas where geographic access could be improved include much of Bradford County, southern and eastern Lycoming County, and extreme northern Tioga County.
Overall, 68% of food insecure individuals in the Northern Tier region have access to at least two charitable food providers within a 15-minute drive time, which is more limited access than found in other Community Hunger Mapping reports. Remedying these gaps is important because access to two charitable food visits per month has substantial positive impacts on reducing very low food security. Importantly, geographic access can be limited by pantry policies, like highly restrictive service territories, which are not reflected in the map and analysis above, so it is important for pantries to address these policies as well.
Approach 1.2: Increase off-hours access, including evening and weekend distributions.
Two in five food insecure individuals in the Northern Tier lack access to a charitable food provider that has weekend or evening hours within a 15-minute drive of their census tract’s center of population, even though close to nine in ten (88%) have access to a pantry in a 15-minute drive. Of all the communities in the Northern Tier, only Mansfield, Williamsport, and Sayre have access to both evening and weekend distributions; Lock Haven has evening access only. Almost all the rest of the region only has access to daytime, work-week distributions.
Weekend and evening distributions are critical because working-age households who visit pantries, especially those with children, are both the most likely to report working full-time and the most likely to experience very low food security. This means that strategically expanding service hours could help reach the most vulnerable households who currently are unable to consistently access charitable food providers due to time constraints and conflicts that prevent them from visiting during regular business hours.
Approach 1.3: Increasing investments in charitable food provision.
Charitable food providers in the Northern Tier are highly effective at reducing hunger in their communities, offering services tailored to their locales. In many cases, these providers are the lowest-barrier social service in their area, and sometimes are the only one available, making pantries a critical means of connecting visitors to other resources available elsewhere. Many pantries in the Northern Tier reported that they had sufficient volunteer help, a key strength, but two-thirds of pantries (64%) reported that funding was the greatest challenge they were facing in providing food to their community.
Funding for charitable food providers has been mixed in recent years, with a significant divergence in state and federal policies and investment. At the state level, a 15% increase in the State Food Purchase Program (SFPP) and an 18% increase in the Pennsylvania Agricultural Surplus System (PASS) was recently included in the FY26 budget. Pantries rely on these programs as a source of funding and food, and the increases will help, although there is still less funding now per person served compared to 20 years ago.
At the federal level, recent disinvestments have caused distributions from The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), the federal government’s largest direct support to the charitable food network, to drop by half in 2025. Due to other program cuts included in the July 2025 budget reconciliation bill, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, need will continue to increase, as an estimated 7% of the SNAP participant population in Pennsylvania will lose access to benefits due to increased administrative barriers such as expanded work requirements. Collective advocacy for robust state and federal support as well as strong community-level investments in food security work will be critical to ensuring that Northern Tier food pantries have enough resources to serve everyone who comes to their doors for help.
Approach 2: Encouraging Robust Participation in Key Government Nutrition Programs
Government nutrition programs like SNAP, WIC, school meal programs, and summer meal programs all provide crucial support to Northern Tier residents facing food insecurity. All counties across the Northern Tier have room to improve participation in SNAP and WIC, as no county is ranked in the top 20 in Pennsylvania in either program.
Many Northern Tier school districts do have above-average participation rates for school lunch and breakfast, but opportunity to increase summer meal access for children across the region remains.
Approach 2.1: Increase SNAP and WIC Participation through Outreach Efforts
Despite recent program cuts, efforts to increase participation in SNAP and WIC remain among the biggest opportunities to increase available resources to food insecure individuals in the region. All six counties in the region have room to increase participation in both important government nutrition programs.
Lycoming County is the strongest performer in SNAP and WIC in the region, although it is still ranked a middling 25th and 22nd in the state in participation in these programs, respectively. Participation for Tioga and Potter follow Lycoming, while Clinton, Bradford and Sullivan fall in the bottom 20 of all 67 counties in participation in the state.
Stakeholders across a variety of different sectors should work together to increase SNAP and WIC participation; federal programs like SNAP, which provides nine meals for each one the charitable food system shares, are key tools to prevent individuals and families from facing food insecurity.
Geographically based access efforts, including tabling or outreach events at community organizations like pantries, libraries, and other community gathering locations should focus on the ZIP Codes that have the highest SNAP and WIC participation gaps and lowest SNAP and WIC participation rates in the region. Pantries are well-targeted locations for SNAP outreach in the Northern Tier because they are low-barrier service points and there are low SNAP participation rates among visitors, although WIC participation is solid among pantry visitors.
SNAP outreach efforts will be even more important going forward as a means of maintaining current participation rates, as the program changes included in the July 2025 federal budget reconciliation bill raised the administrative burden to apply and retain eligibility for SNAP benefits, and the November 2025 outage may have decreased trust in the program. The extent of the struggle to maintain participation at current levels is evidenced by a recent 4.7% drop in SNAP participation in the region since January 2025. Participation dropped more expeditiously with the news of SNAP cuts in summer 2025 in the budget reconciliation bill discussion.
Approach 2.2: Build Upon Success in School Meals Expand Access to Summer Food Programs
Northern Tier schools do an exceptional job of ensuring children have access to breakfast and lunch at school, outperforming schools in the rest of the state by 15% for breakfast and 17% for lunch as of October 2024. This strong performance is due to most schools utilizing the Community Eligibility Provision to offer both breakfast and lunch at no charge to all students and their having done so for several years, creating a stable support on which families can rely. Northern Tier schools are more likely than their peers across the state to use alternative breakfast service models, which helps increase participation further.
However, there remains opportunity to increase access to meals for children during the summer, with just 27 publicly funded SUN meal sites unevenly spread across the region. There is a major opportunity for sites to use the rural non-congregate provision, which allows sites to offer grab-and-go meals in areas where daily visits would create travel burden in the absence of school bus service.
Approach 3: Addressing Upstream and Intersecting Issues with Food Insecurity
Food insecurity is caused by and associated with a variety of upstream and intersecting factors. Among Northern Tier pantry visitors, the most important challenges include high prevalence of chronic health conditions, low incomes, difficulties around housing affordability, and transportation barriers. Households with children face many of these intersecting and upstream issues.
More than half (53%) of pantry visitor households in the Northern Tier had at least one member with a diet-related chronic health condition, including 33% with diabetes, 28% with high blood pressure, 15% with heart disease, and 5% with kidney disease. These chronic health conditions may make it more difficult to work, increase medical costs and economic strain, and make it more difficult to utilize all foods available at pantry distributions.
Given these results, the charitable food system should work to source items that are lower in sugar, sodium, and saturated and trans fats that can allow visitors to meet their dietary needs. These efforts are crucial because highly nutritious, fresh foods are often the items that food insecure neighbors find most difficult to purchase since they are usually more expensive than highly processed options. Pantries can support neighbors with specific dietary needs by offering choice models that allow visitors to select the foods that work for them. Pantries can also partipate in the Healthy Pantry Initiative and offer nutrition education that can help pantry visitors choose and know how to use healthy items with which they may not be familiar.
Unemployment is not a significant contributor to the need for charitable food assistance in the Northern Tier, but income is an important predictor of food security status. Nine in ten pantry visitors in the region stated that their primary sources of household income were Social Security or a pension (52%), Disability or SSI (20%), or full-time work (14%). The plurality of households with children work full time (31%), but they are also the most likely to face very low food security (52%) due to the unpredictability and insufficiency of low-wage work. Two in five (42%) pantry visitors with incomes below the poverty level experience very low food security, compared to one in four (25%) households with incomes above the poverty level.
A quarter of pantry visitors reported having to choose between paying for food and paying for utilities in the last year – the number one reported economic tradeoff with food in the Northern Tier. High heating and cooling expenses point to the critical importance of programs like LIHEAP that can help people afford utilities. Struggles with utilities span all household types, but households with children are the most likely to have been forced to make this choice in the last year, at 30%.
Transportation is the second most commonly reported economic tradeoff with food, having been mentioned by 20% of pantry visitors. While 75% of pantry visitors report access to their own car, the remaining 25% rely on rides, public transit, or biking/walking, which can be particularly difficult in rural areas.
