Even as we struggle with the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, our nation could face additional challenges from hurricanes that typically arise in the Atlantic Ocean during late summer and early fall. Federal action now to boost SNAP benefits and to allow for administrative flexibilities can address hardships due to potential hurricanes as well as those hardships caused by COVID-19.
The COVID-19 virus presents particular challenges for low-income people. To ensure those who lack resources to stockpile food and other basic necessities, and who rely on school breakfast and lunch to help feed their children nutritious food, administrators and legislators should consider adapting Disaster SNAP and disaster provisions of other federal nutrition programs to provide nutrition resources for low-income consumers and to make up for disrupted school meals service; suspending implementation of rules changes that weaken SNAP benefits and enrollment; and increasing SNAP benefit amounts to bolster the program’s countercyclical impacts.
While nothing will compare to sharing advocacy experiences with 1,000+ of your peers, you can tune in to a handful of video livestreams out of the 44 conference sessions available.
As wildfires swept through Northern California in October 2017, the California Department of Social Services, in partnership with the USDA and the impacted California counties, rushed to bring relief to impacted people through SNAP. In the process, stakeholders learned three key lessons for disaster and nutrition leaders.
