8/28/2023 0 Comments Extra food stampsJust because I can manage doesn’t mean I’m getting everything that we need. “You can’t eat healthy without having a nice little budget,” Harris said. Once the emergency allotment is cut, she said, she knows she can do what it takes to make sure there’s food on the table in her home but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy. Some older adults, she said, will see the most precipitous drop in benefits, going from $280 a month to $23.Ĭhasity Harris, 42, said the $519 in benefits she has received monthly since October makes a big difference for her and her granddaughter. The cuts will reduce payments to households that receive assistance to an average of about $6 per person, per day, Vollinger said, adding that $2 per meal isn’t enough to feed a person, especially given other factors, like rising fuel, rent and grocery prices. RELATED: As pandemic-era provisions lapse, millions of Americans to lose Medicaid “There’s no way, that I see, that we’re ever going to make up fully for what’s being lost,” said Ellen Vollinger, SNAP director for the Food Research & Action Center, an anti-hunger nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “It’s simply not possible to make up that difference.”Įach household’s benefits will drop by at least $95 per month, with some households absorbing as much as a $250 reduction, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There’s just no comparing the scale of SNAP to the charitable food sector,” Cheyne said. For every dollar worth of groceries a food bank distributes to a community, SNAP delivers $9. They and food policy experts fear it won’t be enough. “They’re going to go to the grocery store and expect to have money in their account and not be able to buy the food they need to feed their families.”Īnd as the fallout from those cuts hits, food pantry managers in rural areas find themselves on the front lines trying to fill gaps in their communities. “We have so many households who simply aren’t going to know that this is happening,” Cheyne said. And those areas already have higher rates of food insecurity and poverty. A higher percentage of people depend on SNAP in rural areas compared with metro areas. Vincent de Paul focused on reducing childhood hunger. The cuts to SNAP benefits will uniquely hurt people living in rural America, said Andrew Cheyne, managing director of public policy for GRACE, a nonprofit run by the Daughters of Charity of St. Other states, such as Georgia, Indiana, Montana and South Dakota, have already ended the emergency allotments. Officials estimate families King works with will see a 30% to 40% decrease in SNAP payments as emergency allotments tied to the public health emergency halt in 32 states, including Nevada. Before 2020, those payments averaged a little more than $200 and were hiked by a minimum of $95 during the pandemic. The program, administered by the Department of Agriculture, provides monthly stipends to people with low incomes to spend on food. In January, FISH provided food boxes to nearly 790 people.īut King and other food bank managers fear that demand will spike further in March, when officials roll back pandemic-era increases to SNAP benefits. The food pantry, one of a few in this city of about 20,000 people, serves more families now than at any point in King’s 20 years of working there, she said. The beginning of the month is busy for the food pantry, King said, because people who receive benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, come to stock up on free food that helps them stretch their monthly allotments. On a cold morning in early February, Tammy King prepared and loaded boxes and bags of vegetables, fruits, milk, frozen meat and snacks into cars lined up outside the Friends in Service Helping food pantry, known in rural northeastern Nevada as FISH. Watch Video: 6 quick facts that explain SNAP, food stampsĮLKO, Nev.
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