At the front of a snaking line of cars stood Mandy Gordon and her wagon.

She had made the mile-long trek from her home in downtown Cumberland to Western Maryland Food Bank’s pantry so that she could feed her family. Since she doesn’t have access to a car, a long walk and a black cart are her solution to a persistent challenge.

These summer months have been especially hard for Maryland’s low-income families, local advocates say, as they grappled with soaring grocery prices and unusually high temperatures that hit at the same time as reductions in food assistance programs because of federal cuts.

Those newer challenges exacerbated long-standing hurdles for poor rural families, including lack of public transportation and access to grocery stores.

“Every summer, it’s just going to get worse, because as prices are rising, it’s making it harder and harder for anybody to be able to manage their grocery costs,” said Western Maryland Food Bank Executive Director Amy Moyer.

Since the onset of the pandemic, Moyer has witnessed a steady increase in demand across Allegany County each summer. From the summer of 2020 to this summer, the Western Maryland Food Bank’s distribution rose from 231,000 pounds to 270,000 pounds. This summer, the organization saw a fivefold surge in emergency food requests compared to two years ago, Moyer said.

The food insecurity challenges facing rural Maryland reflect a broader national trend. The number of households that reported being unsure of where their next meal was coming from increased sharply in the most recent U.S Department of Agriculture data.

Across the country, most communities that see the highest rates of food insecurity live in rural areas, according to a May report by national nonprofit network Feeding America.

That’s not surprising to Karen Wong, a senior research manager at the nonprofit No Kid Hungry. Rural areas are still recovering from job losses and other factors caused by the pandemic, she said.

Wong said grocers in rural communities were less likely than their urban counterparts to have recouped losses incurred during the pandemic.

On an August morning, Gordon joined a line of more than 30 cars at the food bank in Cumberland. Each was marked with a neon Post-it indicating the number of households they were collecting for.

Gordon’s own note read “two” — one for her own family of eight and one for her elderly, disabled neighbor. Others in the line had sticky notes with higher numbers .

This was the first of Gordon’s weekly rounds, a routine she developed this summer in part by scouring Facebook groups for help. The following day, she planned to haul her cart to Bountiful Blessings at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, and that Friday, she would navigate the 2.5-mile journey to a “brown bag” event on Industrial Street.

Economic data gives some insight into why this has been such a tough year for low-income families. Rising wages haven’t been enough to offset a 20% hike in grocery prices since 2020, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data, leaving families with no choice but to spend a larger slice of their paychecks on food they need to survive.

As a result of inflation, local nonprofits have noticed a significant uptick in working-class individuals seeking food assistance. Those are people who earn too much to qualify for assistance but make too little to comfortably afford groceries.

Grocery inflation also is leaving those who receive benefits with less. With the end of federal and state boosts in aid that came during the pandemic, monthly food assistance has plummeted, causing some families to receive hundreds of dollars less per month in benefits.

While school was out over the summer, Moyer said, families couldn’t rely on consistent breakfasts and lunches provided by the schools for their kids. Though this happens every year, she added, this was the first summer in four years without boosted aid.

The federal government has tried in recent years to close the food aid gap between school years, funding summer food assistance for children who receive free lunches. Those programs are administered at the state level.

Maryland’s Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer program funded $60 monthly per child for families with school-age children from year to year. It got a new name this year, Maryland SunBucks, and decreased its monthly per-child benefit to $40.

From the passenger seat of a dark hatchback, Jessica Brooks said she is feeling the $80 collective drop, forcing her to rely more and more on free food events to feed her four grandchildren.

“Thank god for the P-EBT, but, unfortunately, it’s never enough,” Brooks said.

To get to the food pantry, Brooks said, she carpooled with a family member and neighbor.

Lack of transportation worsens food insecurity in rural Maryland areas such as Allegany County. It ranked among the least healthy counties in Maryland in 2022, with community health surveys citing above-state-average levels of poverty and a lack of public transit as contributing factors. In a 2020 survey, Allegany County residents said the lack of transportation affected their ability to get to a grocery store, and in some cases stifled their access to food pantries.

A countywide health coalition is working to improve access to transportation for low-income residents, but the last five years of Census surveys show the number of Allegany households without cars continues to rise. Most residents without cars are unable to find a grocery store within a 20-minute walking distance from their home, according to data reviewed by The Baltimore Banner.

Even as the median household income rises in Cumberland and the popularity of remote work is helping to reinvigorate the sleepy, blue-collar town in the Western Maryland mountains, more than 20% of the community live in poverty, the Census data shows.

America’s Hauling for Hope, a nonprofit delivering food to households without access to reliable transportation, is using a grant to transport meals in Allegany County through a partnership with Maryland Physicians Care, a Medicaid-managed group.

There was such a “sprawling amount of people that just didn’t have access,” the nonprofit’s co-founder, Clint Rawlings, said.

His group began in 2017 as a delivery service for Marylanders in Belair and other wealthy areas, but shifted focus transporting meals to low income residents following the pandemic. Rawlings started making house calls for Meals on Wheels in 2021.

The demand this summer appears greater among seniors and working families with more than two children, Rawlings said.

“People need more help,” he said.

The early August event was the food bank’s busiest pantry of the summer, distributing 11,000 pounds that made its way to 655 people, according to Moyer, the food bank director.

After receiving her food, Gordon headed home to clean and make dinner for four children, her baby granddaughter, and her nieces and nephews.

After using half a dozen striped bungee cords to secure her groceries in place — “That’s the only problem with all this walking,” she said — Gordon turned toward Frederick Street and rolled away.

“See you next time,” Gordon said to the volunteers.

Baltimore Banner data reporter Greg Morton contributed to this story.