Jillian Perez has never accepted

food before, but Thursday morning, after making a school drop, the mother of four and wife of a Fort Carson contractor found herself sitting in a line of vehicles that wound around an empty field near Mount Carmel Veterans Service Center.

“My husband is proud of providing for his family, but we need a little extra help,” she said. “We’re middle class, not in poverty, but we still have to choose between gas and groceries in between paychecks.”

About 150 households signed up for a drive-through giveaway Thursday for service members and related families, said Joanna Wise, spokeswoman for Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado.

The event was a project of Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization of which Care and Share is a network member, and Raytheon Technologies, which employs 3,200 staff at three

Colorado sites, including a campus in Colorado Springs.

About 20 Raytheon volunteers helped load food from a mobile truck into participants’ trunks, as part of the aerospace and defense company’s $3 million grant initiative for equitable food access, said Sandy Brown, a vice president with Raytheon Intelligence and Space business segment.

The charitable program includes addressing military hunger, she said,

and is one of several focuses of a 10-year, $500 million Raytheon commitment of charitable dollars nationwide to improve communities.

“We feel an affinity for military members who protect and serve, and we feel an obligation to help our military heroes,” Brown said. “It’s one way we can give back to this community.”

Up to 160,000 service members are affected by food insecurity at any given time, said Vince Hall, chief government relations officer at Feeding America, based in Washington, D.C.

Food insecurity is defined as “a lack of access to healthy nutritious food on a regular basis,” he said.

“Every military family should be assured their compensation is enough to live on in the community to which they are stationed,” Hall said.

“They’re willing to wear the uniform of this country and protect our nation, and when they’re sent to some war-torn country, they want to be able to devote all their energy to the job that’s in front of them and not worry about the family that’s behind them.”

The amount of people who queued up early Thursday to pick up cereal, eggs, milk, mac and cheese, tomato sauce, peanut butter and other staples indicates that’s not the case in today’s economic situation, said Colorado Springs native Joe Brady, a veteran who was among the first in line for his share.

“You see so much need in all these cars,” he said, gesturing behind him.

He says he might be homeless in July, when his lease is up and there’s a rent hike.

“Everything costs so much more, and income doesn’t go up,” said Brady, who uses Mount Carmel Veterans Service Center for various assistance. “I’m 78 years old, and it’s sad I have to beg for help. It’s something I never had to do before in my life.”

Hall is advocating for federal change, including for military families to be given access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. A basic military housing allowance is counted as income, which usually precludes families from qualifying, he said.

Local Feeding America affiliates and community food drives host regular giveaways at federal military installations, just outside their gates and in schools where children in military families attend, he said.

“They don’t wear T-shirts saying, ‘I’m hungry,’ but there are kids that are skipping meals because their families are struggling,” Hall said.

“The myth is the only people coming to food distributions are unemployed. The reality is a lot of seniors, people with disabilities and working people whose income isn’t enough to close the gap are coming, which tragically includes military families.”