Volunteers pack apples into boxes at Second Harvest Heartland in Brooklyn Park on May 22, 2020. (Leila Navidi, Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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The good news is our community has kept Depression-era levels of hunger at bay by pitching in time and money and building smart policy interventions to fill fridges. But we're not done dealing with the COVID-era hunger surge. Not even close.

A peak when 1 in 8 folks in Minnesota was hungry during the worst of 2020 has declined to 1 in 12. But that's still a whole lot of people — over 480,000 Minnesotans.

If you are part of a softball team, someone you play with is living with hunger. If you're part of a midsize faith community, dozens of your fellow worshipers are living with hunger. There are eight hungry kids on the average full school bus. Stark racial disparities mean these figures are even higher in communities of color.

Hunger's persistent prevalence is uncomfortable for some of us to consider, especially in the heartland, where we have so much food to share. Well-meaning people express gratitude that the crises of COVID-19 and the related surge in hunger are behind us. In Congress, some policymakers want to sunset the emergency programs that kept so many Minnesotans fed and well, having already curtailed enhanced unemployment insurance benefits and additional Child Tax Credit payments.

If we slow down now, we'll lose critical ground. We must continue to put people first to ensure our fellow Minnesotans have access to safe and nutritious food. Hunger-fighting interventions — like SNAP's increased funding and accessibility or the availability of free meals for all Minnesota students — should be kept in place to prevent crises rather than simply respond to them.

In good, rough and in-between times feeding everyone makes our communities stronger, safer, kinder and more able to weather the unexpected.

The stigma-defying truth is that most Minnesotans (in fact 51% of our residents) have experienced food insecurity. Hunger doesn't discriminate. All of us could face lean times that lead us to accept food or other public assistance at some point in our lives. Our food bank helped feed over 801,000 people last year alone. These people showed strength by accepting the help that set them up to keep the community strong and more COVID-resilient.

If you find yourself on solid ground as you read this, we need your help. Come spend a day packing food for your neighbors. If you can, write a check to your neighborhood hunger-fighting organization. Ask your elected officials what they're doing to get excess crops and locally produced protein to Minnesotans through the Farm to Food Shelf program and how they'll make sure kids won't go hungry at school.

Above all — and maybe hardest of all — make it OK in your family, social and community circles to ask for help. Making hunger more visible is the first step toward eliminating it.

Allison O'Toole is CEO of Second Harvest Heartland. Colleen May is chair of the Second Harvest Heartland board of directors, chair of the Cargill Foundation and president of Cargill's bio-industrial business.