For the Comer Bien blog series, NCLR has asked several of our partners and Affiliates to reflect on the issues raised by families in the video vignettes. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author and Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).
By Jim Weill, President, Food Research and Action Center (FRAC)
Geanette’s experiences, featured in this video vignette and NCLR’s story booklet, capture both the hard struggles of millions of Latino families and some of the smart program strategies that can make those struggles easier.
The first struggle is with poverty and hunger. Latinos have below-average incomes despite high workforce participation rates. Lower wages mean poverty is more frequent. Many low-income Latinos face arbitrary barriers in getting help from public agencies. And, of course, poor or near-poor families are much more likely to struggle to put food on the table. Geanette’s juggling of her work, school, and parenting roles epitomizes how hard it is to “do it all” and keep our families’ heads above water. At FRAC’s website, you can view our Food Hardship Report 2010, where you can find the share of households with children in your state, metro area, or congressional district who report being unable to afford enough food at least some of the time. That means worse health and educational outcomes and more family stress.
The second struggle is getting access to the right food at the right price. Low-income people in this country are more likely than others to live in “food deserts”—places without reasonable access to affordable, nutritious food. They have too few full-service grocery stores and are limited to small convenience stores with few healthy food choices. That means the residents wind up eating less healthy food, or paying more for food, or paying a lot in travel costs and time, as Geanette does, to get reasonably priced food. This just makes the money crunch and the time crunch worse.
On the plus side of Geanette’s story, the SNAP program (it used to be called “food stamps”) helps her and more than 45 million other people—most of them in families with children—purchase a more adequate diet. Monthly SNAP benefits aren’t totally adequate, but they are a huge boost to the families getting them. They improve families’ diets, children’s health, and parents’ ability to pay for other costs (such as rent, utilities, and school fees) from modest earnings.
Unfortunately, too many families don’t actually get SNAP—only about seven out of ten eligible people receive benefits. Others never apply because of language barriers, misplaced fears of consequences, or burdensome requirements like multiple welfare office visits. But many states and localities are taking important steps to fix these problems, and Geanette’s experience shows that multilingual applications and doing business over the phone or Internet rather than requiring office trips are huge steps forward. My organization, the Food Research and Action Center, is proud to be working with the National Council of La Raza to make policies like these happen across the country. Many important strategies for public agencies, community organizations, and advocates to make SNAP and other nutrition programs like WIC, school meals, and summer food programs more responsive to need are described in FRAC’s handbook, Smart Choices in Hard Times.
Better wages and better SNAP systems solve some real problems. But people also need more access to healthy affordable food in their communities. And progress is being made there, too. The federal government and public-private partnerships in places like California and Pennsylvania are launching healthy food financing initiatives to support full-service grocery stores opening up or expanding in food deserts. These are good ideas, but in the end they will succeed only if Geanette and her child and all people in this country, in all communities, have adequate resources to purchase enough food and healthy food. And that means more jobs, better wages, and better public supports from programs like SNAP.
To find out if you, a friend, family member, or neighbor is eligible for SNAP, use USDA’s pre-screening tool in English or Spanish.