Nourish Our Future: The SNAP Gap

On May 4, during Fellow-sip time following worship, we will have an opportunity to write our Senators and Representatives, encouraging them to take steps to combat childhood hunger in our country and around the world. Following the lead of Bread for the World’s Nourish Our Future campaign, we will focus on four initiatives: 1) expanding the Child Tax Credit; 2) fully funding and modernizing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC); 3) addressing food insecurity on college campuses; and 4) providing robust funding for international nutrition programs. This is the third of four articles with background information on these areas of concern.

Today the topic is SNAP. The following comes from Bread for the World’s web site (bread.org), in an article titled, “Improving Child Nutrition at Home and Abroad.”

“Another federal initiative with a significant impact on childhood food insecurity is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. SNAP provides food benefits to low-income families to supplement their grocery budget, making nutritious food more affordable for an average of 41 million people in the U.S. per month.

“SNAP plays a crucial role in protecting children from hunger during economic downturns and was designed to respond quickly and efficiently to increases in need. During the pandemic, SNAP helped ensure families had the nutrition they needed.

“Improving SNAP participation among eligible college students is one way to make the program even more effective. In 2020, an estimated 3.3 million college students were eligible for SNAP benefits. Of those eligible students, 2.2 million students reported that their household did not receive any SNAP benefits. In other words, two-thirds of students who likely meet the stringent eligibility criteria to enroll in SNAP are not benefiting from the program. This is called the “SNAP Gap.” College students who are at risk of food insecurity and eligible to participate should be made aware that they can get help from SNAP.”

We don’t usually think of college students as being at risk of food insecurity, but a growing number are, especially as more lower-income students enroll in college. Many campuses have started offering food pantries and other feeding programs to try to catch students who would otherwise fall through the holes in the safety net. That’s a good and compassionate development, but a better, more effective response would be to close the SNAP Gap and ensure that more students take advantage of their eligibility for benefits.

For decades politicians and pundits have vilified supposed fraudsters who game the system in order to get food benefits they don’t need or deserve. But the data do not bear out these stories. SNAP, WIC, and other food-related government programs are surprisingly lacking in fraud, waste, and abuse, so there is no good reason to deny children and adolescents the nutrition they need to thrive. Spurious anecdotal evidence dreamed up by mean-spirited people should not stop us from caring for those in need among us, and I hope you will join me on May 4 by calling on our legislators to take meaningful action to nourish our future.