When her hospital stopped doing elective surgeries to treat coronavirus patients in El Mirage, Ariz., Trudy Lard went from working full-time with overtime hours to working two days a week.
“It’s been a very trying time,” said Lard, a patient care technician. Because she still has a job, Lard, 57, cannot file for unemployment and isn’t eligible for most financial assistance programs. Her smaller paycheck barely covers rent, bills and food for herself and her youngest granddaughter, 17, who lives with her full-time.
“I raised four girls by myself, and I’ve been raising grandkids forever, and I did it all on my own. No benefits have ever come my way,” she said. “This is something brand-new to me, and I don’t know which way to turn.”
Lard used the federal government’s stimulus check to cover rent and utility bills. She tries not to buy anything additional, other than a few craft supplies so that she and her granddaughter can do art projects together while home in isolation. But she worries about being able to afford food.
Summer has always been hard for hungry children. About 30 million American kids rely on free or reduced-price breakfast and lunches during the school year. But when schools close for the summer, families are often left scrambling to cover those meals. The United States Department of Agriculture’s summer food service program tries to fill the gap by providing free meals to children in low-income areas, distributing food at schools, community centers, summer camps and food pantries. But even in pre-Covid years, the program was only able to reach one child for every seven who received free or reduce price meals during the school year, according to a 2019 report by the Food Research and Action Center in Washington, D.C.
Anti-hunger advocates say that this year the disparity will be exacerbated, as many summer meal programs have shut down or had to substantially change operations. At the same time, government financial assistance programs are struggling to operate under the twin pressures of a pandemic and the rise in unemployment, which has increased the number of families needing public assistance. And underpinning all of that is a pervasive stigma against families who can’t feed their children.
“Nobody should be afraid to apply for a benefit because they’re afraid of how they’ll be perceived as a parent,” said Parker Gilkesson, a policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C., who has previously worked as a social services eligibility worker in North Carolina. “But that’s what happens. I can’t count the number of times a client would tell me, ‘I’m not like those other people who get benefits.’”
Gilkesson said most families in need of food first visit a food bank or meal distribution site, because those programs rarely require participants to disclose the kind of personal information required to apply for public benefits. But emergency food distribution organizations have had to pivot from serving large groups of children in school cafeterias and community centers to contactless meal drop-offs and gift cards.
When a $50 gift card to a local grocery store arrived in the mail, Lard was surprised, and relieved. “I was like, somebody thought of us?” Lard said. “Thank you, Jesus.”
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The gift card came from Corbin’s Legacy, an anti-hunger nonprofit based in Mesa, Ariz., which before the pandemic, distributed backpacks full of meals to local children who qualify for their school’s free and reduced-price lunch program, as Lard’s granddaughter does.
“Our goal is to make sure families can still have those meals together when school isn’t in session,” said Joan Leafman, Ph.D., the organization’s executive director. “We distributed 3,000 bags of food on March 23, but a week later, Arizona closed.”
With fewer volunteers able to shop and pack food bags, and no schools or community centers open to distribute the meals, the organization pivoted to grocery store gift cards. Leafman said the program now distributes to about 1,000 families every two weeks.
Since mid-March, childhood hunger has risen to a rate three times higher than reported during the financial crisis of 2008, with nearly one in five households of mothers with children ages 12 and younger not getting enough to eat, according to a survey by the Brookings Institution published in May.
Congress authorized the Pandemic-EBT program in mid-March, to provide families with electronic debit cards with the cash value of school meals instead. But after two months, only about 15 percent of eligible children had received benefits, according to a New York Times analysis. And the program only covered school-year meals; Congress has yet to authorize Pandemic-EBT to cover summer meals. Meal distribution programs are also bracing for the end of short-term financial help from the government, like the pandemic stimulus checks and unemployment bonuses.
Melissa Opsahl, the branch operations director for the Y.M.C.A. of Metropolitan Detroit, said her team usually offers one meal per child to those who participate in Y after-school activities. But beginning in mid-March, they ramped up to provide bags with four days’ worth of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks to anyone who came by on their biweekly meal drop days. But she’s worried about how the Y.M.C.A. will sustain that distribution through the increased demand of summer.
“We normally serve three or four times more meals in the summer than we do during the school year, and that takes months of planning,” said Opsahl. “What we’re facing right now is just the unknown — we know the need will be greater, but by how much? Our biggest concern is what if we show up to a site and run out of meals.”
Sara, a mom who asked to use only her first name because of stigma concerns against families who cannot feed their children, has been picking up meals at a YMCA in Clinton Township, Mich., for her 2-year-old son since her husband was laid off as a technician at a printing company in mid-May.
“The first thing we worried about when he lost his job was, how are we going to take care of our son?” said Sara, who is also managing a high-risk pregnancy and due in September.
She was able to qualify for Medicaid and also participates in federal nutrition program known as WIC, for women, infants and children. But she didn’t qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), because her husband’s unemployment benefits pushed their household income above the threshold.
“They didn’t take into account that it’s temporary,” she said. “But being able to get meals at the Y gives us more than enough to feed our son, which means that’s one problem we don’t need to solve right now.”
Rachel Cahill, an anti-hunger advocate who works with state and national organizations in Ohio, confirmed that many SNAP agencies are struggling to navigate workflow issues, with most employees still working remotely to manage heightened demand.
“Ohio agencies normally process 40,000 applications a month and we received over 100,000 in April alone,” she said.
Congress authorized the United States Department of Agriculture to increase all SNAP recipients’ benefits to their state’s maximum household allotment in April, but those emergency increases are set to expire this month. The $3 trillion pandemic relief package the House passed in May would provide a 15 percent increase to benefits for all SNAP recipients, even those already receiving the current maximum household allotment. But the Senate has not voted on the bill.
WIC agencies have also struggled under the pandemic, especially because the program required families to visit a local office every few months to continue to qualify for their benefits, including food assistance. When the pandemic made that impossible, the U.S.D.A. issued waivers allowing WIC to move services online, which advocates described as “a game changer” for a program that had seen participation decline in recent years, in part because young families hesitated to bring their toddlers to sit in county health offices for frequent appointments.
“The majority of state agencies are reporting that their caseloads have increased by as much as 10 percent since February,” said Brian Dittmeier, a senior public policy counsel for the National WIC Association.
The waivers are now in place through Sept. 30, but it’s unclear whether the addition of online services will remain a permanent part of how WIC does business.
Complicating matters, the WIC program doesn’t allow recipients to shop online for food nor use curbside pickup or self-checkout lanes in most places, Dittmeier said.
Meg, a SNAP and WIC participant and mother of a 3-year-old and 6-month-old in Kirksville, Missouri, and who also asked to use her first name only, said she makes a separate grocery trip each week for her WIC foods.
“I can use my SNAP card on anything and do curbside pickup, but for WIC, I have to go into the store, and since I don’t have child care, I’m taking my kids in with me every time,” she said.
Separate checkout lines (which some stores also use for SNAP recipients) and other such rules are inequitable, Gilkesson said, because they require program participants to potentially increase their risk for virus exposure by spending more time in stores. They also perpetuate the stigma around needing help to buy food.
“Even though nobody knows who you are, it can feel shameful, to feel like I can’t provide for my family,” Sara said.
And with so many more families now in need, Gilkesson said, the current crisis has only highlighted how much Americans believe that some people are more deserving of help than others.
“We’ve moved the needle a little, in that we understand more people deserve help right now,” Gilkesson said. “But we still demonize people’s experience of poverty as if it’s their own fault. And a world pandemic won’t change that.”
Virginia Sole-Smith is the author of “The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America,” and co-host of the Comfort Food Podcast.
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