Every spring, the United Way of Greater Nashua runs into the same wall. As warmer weather pulls families into vacation mode, donations to local food pantries fall off a cliff. At the same time, the school year ends and tens of thousands of children across southern New Hampshire lose access to the breakfasts and lunches that the public school system provides during the academic year. The result is a predictable annual gap that begins in late May and runs through the start of the new school year in late August. The United Way’s response, an annual supermarket-based food drive named in memory of longtime Nashua community leader Kevin Slattery, is now scaling up for 2026, and the organization needs more than 100 volunteers to make it work. The two-day drive runs Saturday, May 30, and Sunday, May 31, at grocery stores across the Greater Nashua region.
According to reporting from New Hampshire Public Radio, Mike Apfelberg, the president of the United Way of Greater Nashua, framed the volunteer ask as a direct intervention in a problem that does not solve itself. Volunteers stand outside participating supermarkets across the region and ask shoppers to pick up a few extra items as they head in to do their normal grocery run. Those donated items are then channeled into the local pantries that feed Greater Nashua throughout the summer months. The model is simple, the marginal cost to each shopper is small, and at the scale the United Way operates, it produces a meaningful injection of food into pantries that would otherwise face a serious shortfall by mid-June.
Why summer is the hardest season for pantries
For most New Hampshire residents who do not work in food security, the summer pantry crunch is invisible. Food drives are most prominent in November and December, around Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, when both the cultural rhythm of giving and the visible need at warming centers and homeless shelters drive donation behavior. By contrast, late May and June feel, to most donors, like a season of abundance. The truth on the ground at the pantries is the reverse.
The mechanics work in two reinforcing directions. On the donor side, families that are about to leave on vacation, send kids to camp, or take on the higher discretionary spending that comes with summer activities are less likely to think about food drives. Corporate giving falls off as offices clear out for the season. Religious congregations, which run a substantial share of the volunteer-driven food collection in the state, see attendance dip as members travel. The pantries themselves report donation drops that can run 20 to 40 percent in some communities relative to the spring peak.
On the demand side, the picture is the opposite. The end of the school year cuts off school breakfast and school lunch programs that, for many lower-income New Hampshire households, function as the most reliable two meals their children will eat in a given day. Summer feeding programs, when they exist, fill some of that gap, but coverage is uneven. Families that relied on free or reduced-price school meals during the academic year find themselves needing to add 10 or more meals per child per week to a household food budget that is already stretched. The pantries become the bridge.
Apfelberg told NHPR that food insecurity in the region is not as bad as it was a few months ago when SNAP benefits were briefly suspended during a federal funding lapse, but it is still critical, especially with the rising cost of gas. The gas point is worth dwelling on. For families who are food insecure, transportation cost is part of the food cost. A pantry that requires a 20-mile round trip is, in real dollars, a more expensive resource when fuel prices are higher. Drives that put donations into pantries that are easier for low-income families to reach reduce that hidden cost.
How the May 30-31 drive will work
The Kevin Slattery Memorial Food Drive is named for a Nashua-area community leader whose decades of work on poverty and food insecurity issues left a deep mark on the region. The 2026 edition follows the now-established model. Volunteers commit to two-hour or three-hour shifts at participating supermarkets across the Greater Nashua region. They distribute small lists of suggested donation items to shoppers entering the store, accept donated items as shoppers leave, and bag and label the donations for transfer to partner pantries. The work is not technically demanding. The crucial variable is volunteer coverage. With more volunteers, the United Way can staff more stores for longer hours, which translates directly into more food collected.
For the 2026 drive, the United Way is targeting more than 100 volunteers across the two days. New Hampshire residents who want to sign up are directed to unitedwaynashua.org for shift selection and onboarding details. Volunteers do not need any prior experience and there is no minimum time commitment beyond the length of a single shift, although the organization welcomes returning volunteers who can take multiple shifts.
The donation items most useful to the partner pantries are non-perishable staples that hold up well in summer storage and that translate into real meals for households without elaborate cooking infrastructure. Peanut butter, canned tuna, canned chicken, shelf-stable milk, low-sodium canned vegetables, canned fruit in juice rather than syrup, dry pasta, pasta sauce in glass or BPA-free cans, rice, cereal, and oatmeal are all reliable choices. Pantries also accept toiletries and household paper goods, which are not covered by SNAP and which family budgets often have to absorb on top of food costs.
The bigger food security picture in New Hampshire
The Nashua effort is one of the more visible local responses to a problem that is felt across New Hampshire. Statewide food insecurity, as measured by the New Hampshire Food Bank and federal hunger metrics, has risen meaningfully since 2022, driven by inflation, higher housing costs, and the partial unwinding of pandemic-era nutrition supports. Recent reporting from across the state has documented the strain on small rural pantries in particular, and the volatile dynamics produced by federal SNAP policy changes that have at moments cut off benefits to households on short notice.
In Nashua and surrounding towns, the demographics of food insecurity have also shifted. New Americans and immigrant families, including the substantial population of Brazilian and Spanish-speaking residents the city has welcomed in recent years, are part of the pantry client base, alongside long-standing populations of low-income elderly residents and working families whose wages have not kept pace with the city’s housing costs. Volunteer-driven drives like the one the United Way is running cannot solve those structural challenges, but they buy households time and reduce acute hunger during the months when the gap is most pronounced.
For background on the policy context, see our coverage of the stalled childcare workforce funding that has left 73,000 NH children short on care and our recent reporting on the Granite Steps childcare workforce grant that was tabled this spring. For families navigating health and benefits decisions tied to food access, our reporting on Medicaid loss and rural health priorities at Go North provides additional context.
How New Hampshire residents can help
The most direct way for residents in the Greater Nashua area to support the May 30-31 drive is to sign up for a volunteer shift through unitedwaynashua.org. Even a single two-hour commitment, multiplied across the more than 100 volunteers the organization is seeking, fills the staffing gaps that determine whether stores can be covered.
For residents outside the Greater Nashua region, the same dynamic plays out at local United Way affiliates and community food banks across the state. The New Hampshire Food Bank coordinates a network of partner pantries, and most regional food banks run analog summer drives that depend on the same kind of volunteer recruitment.
Donors who cannot volunteer but want to help can drop non-perishable food items at any participating supermarket on May 30 or 31. The United Way will publish a list of participating store locations on its website in advance of the weekend. Cash donations to the United Way of Greater Nashua are also accepted year-round and are particularly valuable to the partner pantries because the bulk-purchasing power of the central organization stretches each donated dollar significantly further than the equivalent retail purchase.
The Kevin Slattery Memorial Food Drive carries the name of a man who spent his career making sure that his neighbors had enough to eat. The 2026 edition is the latest installment of work that the Greater Nashua region has done together for years, and it is worth remembering that the difference between a pantry that runs out of food in mid-July and one that holds steady through the back-to-school shopping season often comes down to a few hundred volunteer hours and a Saturday morning grocery run.
Frequently Asked Questions
For related coverage, see our reporting on A Long-Term Preparedness Guide for New Hampshire Homeowners.
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