Tucked behind the laundry room at an apartment complex in Southeast D.C. lies Fresh Market at Washington View. Twice a week, this unique resource offers free essential and specialty food products to D.C. residents who registered for the service. On a recent afternoon, one patron entered rattling off a highly specific list.
“I need steak, lobster, gift cards, my rent paid this month,” he said as the neighbors who staff the pantry hyped him up. “Gas bill! Water bill!” He settled on applesauce, cornbread mix, one bottle of water and grapes.
Local nonprofit Building Bridges Across the River opened the market in 2024 in collaboration with 15 corporate partners and with input from residents of the apartment complex. The market began offering produce and protein in 2025 through the Freshfarm Food Hub, a nonprofit that sources from farmers across Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Lately, there has been a significant uptick in visits from residents.
Carrie Vaughn, farm director with Building Bridges Across the River, said the market “probably [has] twice as many people coming now per week as we had this time last year.”
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A need to connect residents to resources has been growing across the District over the last year as access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid benefits became sharply limited through the Trump-backed “one big, beautiful bill.”
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As previously reported by The Washington Sun, the Capitol Area Food Bank’s 2026 Hunger Report found that more than one in three households across the capital region experienced food insecurity in the past year. According to the report’s heat map, the greatest food distribution in D.C. occurred in Ward 8.
More than 9,000 D.C. residents lost their SNAP benefits from July 2025, when changes to the program’s eligibility requirements went into effect, to June 2026, according to the Food Research and Action Center. Many people, including the elderly, now face an increased work requirement to qualify.
“With SNAP, we’ve got older folks who have never had to pull together documentation to prove that they are eligible for the food assistance, and now they have to,” said Naseema Shafi, health CEO of the Whitman-Walker clinic. “We know from the different food access reports that our elders in the community are some of our most food insecure.”
Vaughn, who said her organization began restructuring its approach to community support after dealing with a surge of need during the government shutdown last year, said “once we saw that changes to SNAP were coming, we didn’t want to be as reactive as we were last year.”
For Washington View resident Angela Clemons, a mother of three who is both a patron and an employee of the food pantry, having help maintaining benefits and keeping food on the table is vital for her family. “People are gonna really need the pantry because if you’re not working, then you can’t get SNAP,” she said. “And it’s hard to find a job.”
To counter the effects of the economic and policy changes, Building Bridges partnered with seven organizations to create another collaborative. The network’s workforce and wellness initiative helps eligible residents keep their benefits by providing workforce training, assisting with paperwork, identifying exemptions and maintaining access to resources like Fresh Market.
“The reason workforce and wellness came together was because we’re helper organizations,” Shafi said. “We think we can do something really impactful when we’re working across our sectors. People can find someone who can help them navigate these really difficult things.”
The organizations are also working to identify and help especially vulnerable residents, including immigrants, whose ability to obtain legal residency can depend on whether they have received social safety benefits. The public charge policy “has made people feel like they can’t access benefits that they’re entitled to,” Shafi said. “They’re afraid that it’ll get counted negatively on their immigration journey.”
Shafi said the network is also looking to identify less obvious vulnerable demographics, including childless, single men. “We have a lot of men in our community who don’t access health care until they’re really sick, and we have a lot of men in our community who are facing so many other barriers,” Shafi said. “This is a lot more burden on them, too.”
As policies and requirements evolve, the organizations continue to assist residents in qualifying for benefits and filling gaps in coverage. Building Bridges CEO Scott Kratz said the initiative is now ramping up efforts to provide resources as the deadline to meet new work requirements or qualify for Medicaid exemptions approaches.
“These community health care workers can help to make sure that they get exempted,” he said of work requirements for assistance programs. “If they’re exempt [from SNAP], that also could exempt them from Medicaid cuts starting in January.”
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