In this guest blog post, Dr. Janet Poppendieck, Urban School Food Alliance Advisory Council Member, highlights 10 key reasons to support free healthy school meals for all. Professor Poppendieck is the author of Free For All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010).
The Trump administration’s 2019 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) public charge rule has been removed. This victory is in no small part thanks to the tireless work of anti-hunger advocates and Protecting Immigrant Families Campaign partners who helped block the public charge rule and its harms to the nutrition, health, and well-being of immigrant families.
On March 31, attorneys representing Pennsylvania Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants secured an important victory when the Biden administration abandoned the Trump administration’s opposition to Families First SNAP Emergency Assistance going to the lowest income households already at the maximum benefit levels.
In fiscal year 2019, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service (USDA FNS) reported that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) retailer redemptions approximated $56 billion. In their recently released fiscal year 2020 data, that number dramatically increased to $78 billion. FNS attributes this 40 percent increase in redemptions to the emergency benefits provided in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has been one year since the COVID-19 pandemic caused extraordinary disruptions to life in the United States. The public health and economic fallout from the pandemic has been widespread, and also has exposed long-standing disparities and inequities in access to health care, education, employment, housing, and food. As the crisis unfolded, it did not take long for the nation to become painfully aware of the material hardships facing millions of Americans. In order to address the various challenges facing the nation, the federal government took a number of actions to provide relief for struggling families. One key action was leveraging and expanding federal nutrition resources, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
