Poll conducted by No Kid Hungry Virginia finds that families with children in K-12 public schools are especially hard-hit.
More than three-quarters of Virginians reported that it has become harder to afford groceries in the last 12 months, according to the results of a new poll from No Kid Hungry Virginia, and families with children in K-12 public schools in particular are struggling.
The poll, which was conducted last month for No Kid Hungry Virginia by Change Research, found that families are making trade-offs to afford food, with 62% of K-12 public school families reporting that they have had to choose between paying for food and other essentials.
Sixty-eight percent of parents with children in public schools also reported that figuring out how to afford nutritious food causes them stress and affects their mental health.
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The poll found that about half of all Virginians said they are buying less or no fresh produce and less or no protein in order to save on groceries—but more than half (55%) of K-12 public school families said they are making these sacrifices.
Eighty-nine percent of households with annual incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 reported that the cost of food is rising faster than their incomes.
Sarah Steely, executive director of No Kid Hungry Virginia, said these numbers are “hard to ignore.”
“I’ve been in this job for eight years and certainly I understand that hunger exists in every corner of the Commonwealth, but I wasn’t expecting the numbers to be as large as they are,” she told the Advance. “I was surprised to see how many Virginians are impacted by hunger or by challenges making ends meet that. That topline stat of over 3/4 of Virginians finding it harder to buy groceries today than a year ago—that’s just a big number and hard to ignore.”
Steely said it’s evident from the poll that “Virginians are struggling.”
“Because this is so widespread, we all know someone [affected by this],” she said. “These are our children, our neighbors, our coworkers, they go to our church. We all know someone who is making tough tradeoffs.”
The poll, which was conducted anonymously, allowed respondents to write longer answers to questions about how an unlimited grocery budget would impact their lives. Steely said the answers were hard to read.
“We would eat much healthier and wouldn’t have to skip meals anymore. We also wouldn’t have to sink into more credit card debt to afford food,” a mother from Richmond shared.
Another respondent from Bedford County said that an increased grocery budget would allow “more time with my children and my wife, [to] work on repairing our new home, and [to] save for the future.”
Families reported that they’d eat healthier and wouldn’t skip meals if they had unlimited grocery budgets, Steely said.
The poll also reflected a demand for legislative action to end childhood hunger, with 92% of respondents saying elected officials should do more towards this goal and 95% saying it should be “a shared, bipartisan effort.”
“As we get into the 2025 General Assembly session, we will be talking with law makers, and we want to continue working together to support strong nutrition policies to ensure that every student has access to healthy food,” Steely said.
The poll was conducted from August 15 to 21, 2024, on 1,278 people, a sample “reflective of the adult population in Virginia,” according to Change Research.
A memo with more poll results is available here.
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