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Between January and mid-October 2025, calls to native 211 helplines from folks in search of food pantries in their group held steady at nearly 1,000 calls per day.
But as the federal government shutdown entered its fourth week in late October, states began to warn residents that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program advantages, generally generally known as food stamps, would doubtless be affected. Nearly 42 million Americans receive SNAP benefits every month.
Over the following a number of days, calls to 211 from people seeking food pantries doubled to over 2,200 per day. Then on Oct. 26, the Trump administration introduced that SNAP advantages would not be arriving as scheduled in November. The subsequent day, food pantry calls skyrocketed to three,324. The following day, calls reached 3,870. By Wednesday, it was 4,214.
We are public well being scientists specializing in health communication and unmet social needs. We and our colleagues have been working carefully with the 211 network of helplines throughout the U.S. for 18 years.
Excluding disasters, sudden surges of this magnitude in requests for food or another want are uncommon at 211s, and may sign each public fear and want, as occurred in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like 911 for emergencies, 211 is a national three-digit dialing code, launched in 2000, that connects callers to data specialists on the nearest native 211 helpline. Those specialists hearken to callers’ wants and supply them with referrals to well being and social service suppliers close to them that might be able to assist.
Every name to 211 is assessed by the necessity of the caller, comparable to shelter, hire, utilities or food – every of which has its personal code.
Callers are disproportionately women, most of whom have youngsters or teenagers dwelling in their properties. Most don’t make sufficient cash to make ends meet. They name 211 in search of assist paying hire or utility payments, getting food to feed their household, or securing family requirements like a winter coat for a baby, or a mattress.
READ: Who gets SNAP benefits in 5 charts
The hotline doesn’t remedy these issues for callers, however 211 data specialists use probably the most present native data obtainable to refer callers to service companies which can be most definitely to have assets to assist.
The 211 community is the closest factor the U.S. has to a real-time surveillance system of the wants of low-income Americans.
There are roughly 200 state and native 211s in the U.S., and on a median day they’ll collectively field between 35,000 and 40,000 requests for assist. Each request is coded utilizing a taxonomy of over 10,000 want sorts, is time- and date-stamped, and is linked to the caller’s ZIP code. In addition to cellphone calls acquired by their helplines, 211s more and more observe requests they obtain on-line, by their web sites. The nationwide community of 211s covers all 50 states and 99% of the U.S. population.
It’s encouraging to us that with every passing yr of giving talks and lectures about 211, increasingly more viewers members increase their arms when requested in the event that they’ve ever heard of 211. But it’s removed from 100%. If you’re one of these along with your hand down, right here’s what that you must know.
Our workforce goals to deploy the newest strategies from knowledge science, predictive analytics and synthetic intelligence to detect developments in important wants sooner and at a extra localized degree, growing the pace and effectivity of getting wanted assist to area people members.
Our analysis has described the needs of callers who attain out to 211, community capacity to respond to callers’ needs, the flexibility of 211 to detect rapid changes in group wants, and the advantages of integrating health referrals into 211s.
READ: Nation’s most comprehensive report on food insecurity is scrapped
When we noticed food requests rising sharply in late October, we reached out to native leaders at 211 name facilities to get insights into what they have been listening to from callers.
Robin Pokojski, vice chairman of 211 and group partnerships at United Way of Greater St. Louis, reported that with all of the uncertainty round SNAP advantages, callers have been initially “anticipating” a want for food pantries. Tiffany Olson, who directs important providers at Crisis Connections and its 211 name heart in Washington state, shared that even callers who rely closely on their SNAP advantages generally need to use food banks as a supplement.
Those callers know that pivoting to rely solely on food banks probably won’t be enough to fulfill their food wants in full. They notice that food pantries and food banks will likely be extra closely burdened if SNAP advantages are unavailable.
The trove of each day knowledge on the wants of U.S. callers to 211 on the ZIP code degree is unparalleled. Yet for years it was nearly invisible to anybody who didn’t work at a 211 hotline.
Even for individuals who work and volunteer throughout the 211 system, formal reporting on caller wants inside a group was minimal, comparable to a one-page annual abstract.
That modified in 2013.
Working with 211s throughout the nation, our workforce created 211 Counts, a assortment of user-friendly, public-facing knowledge dashboards for native 211s throughout the U.S.
The dashboards enable customers to discover the highest wants in their group, see which neighborhoods are affected most and perceive how wants are altering over time. The knowledge might be sorted by legislative districts, faculty districts and counties to make the findings extra related to completely different audiences.
Data on 211 requests are up to date every evening. Now in its twelfth yr, 211 Counts contains knowledge on over 90 million requests from 211 callers in all or elements of 44 states. The native dashboards have been visited thousands and thousands of instances.
This shouldn’t be the primary time knowledge collected by 211 hotlines has detected early indicators of bother for some Americans. Just weeks in the past, we discovered that calls from folks in search of assistance making automotive funds have been growing steadily for 5 months, with each day calls peaking in October, at almost twice the speed of May 2025.
Before that, 211s have been months forward of information reporting in seeing public misery associated with the 2022 baby formula shortage, the 2016 Flint water crisis and the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis.
When requests for main wants like food improve three- to fourfold in a single day, each native 211 is more likely to register this abrupt change.
But when much less frequent wants, comparable to automotive cost assistance, creep up slowly, with an additional name right here and there over a number of months, it’s unlikely that any native 211 hotline would discover.
That’s when the benefits of massive knowledge are biggest. By combining caller wants from 211s throughout the nation, patterns emerge that will in any other case be missed. New knowledge science instruments are quickly enhancing the pace and accuracy of detecting slight modifications. When group and nationwide leaders are made conscious of potential rising threats, these threats might be tracked extra carefully and responses ready.
It’s straightforward to lose sight of the truth that every knowledge level is a hungry baby or a apprehensive mother or father.
Hotlines and food banks and food pantries want assist in this second to feed folks. But most native security web methods battle to fulfill their group’s wants on a regular basis. Data that paperwork the magnitude of want received’t repair the shortage of native assistance, however it might probably assist information communities in allocating restricted assets.