Families changed how they purchased food during the COVID-19 pandemic. They ate at home more, relying on supermarkets and online ordering and home delivery to access food as public health guidelines changed. Those changes altered how food-insecure people with disabilities access food too.

During the pandemic, food banks and home delivery services entered into partnerships that enabled people with disabilities—who face significant food security and access barriers—to have free groceries and meals delivered directly to their homes.

Home delivery of charitable food benefits all types of eligible households by reducing stigma and saving time for families struggling with transportation barriers or caregiving responsibilities that make it hard to travel to a food bank. However, they’re especially effective at increasing access to charitable food among people with disabilities, according to our conversations with members of antihunger organizations and clients participating in one home delivery partnership, DoorDash’s Project DASH. They also support antihunger organizations in tackling disparities in food access and provide food banks with new capacity to reach people unable to pick up food in person.

Given home delivery partnerships’ many advantages, sustaining them beyond the pandemic is integral to supporting the well-being of people with disabilities facing food insecurity. Policymakers, practitioners, advocates, and funders have a role to play in elevating these partnerships and ensuring food assistance policies are responsive to disabled people’s needs and preferences.

Why are home delivery partnerships needed?

Households where someone lives with a disability can be up to three times more likely to struggle with food insecurity than households without a disabled member. Though being out of the labor force because of a disability is associated with the highest rates of need, households where someone has a disability but is still working are also twice as likely to report trouble affording enough food.

Many factors may restrict disabled people’s food access, including limitations on work, often-meager government disability payments, a lack of accessible transportation, physical barriers to accessing food banks and stores, higher costs of health care and other supports that may be needed to manage a disability, and constrained access to healthy food options. People with disabilities who lack a support network to help with meeting basic needs, like picking up food from a grocery store or food pantry, are further disadvantaged. Even those with a strong support network may find it challenging to depend on family members or friends for regular support or be reluctant to ask for help navigating food access challenges. The food insecurity they face as a result is associated with overall poorer health outcomes, which may further erode well-being and make it more challenging to manage chronic illness.

I can’t drive anymore because of my disability.… [Home delivery is] a wonderful alternative for someone who can’t physically go to the food bank like myself.

—Project DASH participant

What are the benefits of home delivery partnerships?

Before the pandemic, home delivery, such as Meals on Wheels, typically focused on providing prepared meals to seniors, with less support available for people of all ages with disabilities. Even if people qualify for Meals on Wheels, many can and prefer to cook their own meals, so home delivery partnerships providing free groceries, rather than prepared meals, can support much-desired self-sufficiency.

I’m an older woman. I can’t go out, I can’t walk well, but I can cook well!

—Project DASH participant

Home delivery partnerships also reduce food access barriers for people with disabilities who need help with food resources. Nearly all households with disabled members participating in home delivery programs report it saved them money (98.1 percent), and other reported benefits include fewer trips to the grocery store (92.6 percent) and the ability to stretch public benefits (87.9 percent). While these savings are important for any food-insecure household, they can be critical for households with members who have disabilities, who face overall higher costs to meet basic needs and often receive insufficient public benefits.

These partnerships also enhance the capacity of food banks and other charitable organizations to meet the food needs of people with disabilities at scale. Nine in 10 (90.8 percent) organizations that partnered with Project DASH reported that the partnership allowed them to build capacity for services they otherwise would not be able to offer. Nearly 3 in 4 (72.4 percent) reported they could reach new populations. Home delivery partnerships have also boosted some food banks’ capacity to deliver more government-funded food assistance, such as monthly food boxes provided for older adults through the Commodity Supplemental Food Program.

Supporting the food security of people with disabilities requires making disability-responsive policy the norm

Sustainable funding is crucial to capitalizing on pandemic-era innovations like home delivery partnerships and ensuring households with disabled members have the necessary supports to meet their food needs. While 8 in 10 (82.3 percent) charitable food providers working with Project DASH reported planning to continue home delivery, virtually all cited a potential lack of sufficient funding as their top barrier to doing so.

Policymakers, practitioners, and funders can take three steps to support these efforts and normalize making policy responsive to the needs of people with disabilities:

1. Make strategies to reach people with disabilities a central part of food assistance infrastructure. Despite their high food insecurity rates and access challenges, people with disabilities are often an afterthought in food assistance policies and programs. Building sufficient funding resources into both public and private programs to support home delivery options in the long term is one way to better integrate disabled people in the food assistance infrastructure. Other promising strategies include ensuring that home-delivered grocery fees for people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are covered by the program; that federal programs that provide direct food distribution, including the Emergency Food Assistance Program and Commodity Supplemental Food Program, have funding to support home delivery; and that other funders prioritize a home-delivery component in charitable food grantmaking.
2. Prioritize eliminating the disproportionate risk of food insecurity among households where someone has a disability. This includes not just food-specific solutions but a broader recognition of how disability can increase overall household expenses and constrain income. Addressing food access barriers for people with disabilities requires increasing benefits’ sufficiency and program flexibilities to ensure disabled people don’t have to consistently rely on charitable food to meet their needs.
3. Center the voices of people with disabilities in the design and evaluation of food access strategies that are fully responsive to their needs and preferences, in the true spirit of the disability justice framing of “nothing about us without us.”