Downsized: Second Harvest of the Big Bend lays off a third of its staff

Second Harvest of the Big Bend this week laid off a third of its workforce due to recent changes in national grant funding availability and usage restrictions following the COVID-19 pandemic, according to leadership there.

Staffing cuts took out 20 employees across multiple divisions within the nonprofit agency, which provides fresh produce and meals for residents facing food insecurity throughout 16 counties in the Big Bend region.

For affected employees, Friday was their last day. They'll receive another two weeks of pay and a health and benefits extension to the end of April, CEO Monique Ellsworth said.

Ellsworth said the pandemic forced the agency to hire more employees to handle the sudden surge of need for food as residents faced layoffs, reduced hours and overall uncertainty.

"A lot of national grants came to food banks, and so we were able to scale up in response," Ellsworth said. "Now we're recalibrating to what is our post-pandemic size going to be, which is still growth from where we were pre-pandemic.

"When I got here, there were 23 staff members, and next week when we come into work there'll be 35 of us."

Ellsworth said she reached out to Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks, and learned others were having the same difficulty with national grants as Second Harvest.

"They let us know that this is something that they're seeing across the country," she said. "That growth during the pandemic, everybody is kind of scaling down and downshifting to what post-pandemic funding is going to allow."

The organization plans to continue its long-term vision for bringing innovative ways to fight hunger within the local community.

At the height of the pandemic, Second Harvest received a large monetary gift of $525,000 from Mackenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos. Ellsworth said the money allowed the agency to kickstart its capital campaign that's nearing completion and to establish endowments.

News of the layoffs came the same day the Florida Commerce Department announced "the regional unemployment rate for Gadsden, Leon, and Wakulla counties was 3.3% for February 2024. The region’s February 2024 unemployment rate was 0.4 percentage point greater than the region’s year ago rate of 2.9%."

Contact Economic Development Reporter TaMaryn Waters at tlwaters@tallahassee.com and follow @TaMarynWaters on X.