By Anne Blythe
As Congressional Republicans wrangled final votes for the federal budget that became law last week, a harsh reality was setting in for Molly De Marco, a research scientist at the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education, or SNAP-Ed, was one of the federally funded initiatives on the chopping block.
De Marco, also an assistant professor in nutrition at the UNC Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, has been working in SNAP-Ed for 15 years — helping people learn how to stretch their dollars for nutritious meals, grow their own food and improve their health and physical fitness while also advocating for things in their communities that align with those goals.
North Carolina receives about $11 million annually in SNAP-Ed funds, and $1.8 million of that comes to the UNC program, which then leverages those funds to support community gardens and work with communities to help them make healthy food choices and more.
The sweeping budget that Congressional Republicans named the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” eliminates SNAP-Ed, ending a 32-year-old nutrition program during a time when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, maintains that focusing on children’s health, addressing obesity and tackling food additives will “Make America Healthy Again.”
“We were somewhat surprised that the administration and the House and Senate Republicans would just completely eliminate this program,” De Marco told NC Health News last week.
Lost jobs
In North Carolina, 176 people are employed through the SNAP-Ed program, De Marco said.
“People don’t have other funds to supplement these, so we’re going to see most of these people just losing their job,” she added.
More than jobs will be lost with the demise of SNAP-Ed. Program administrators have gained lots of knowledge working with community partners about how to help people in their midst improve their diet. Those networks won’t be as active.
“Just our team has at least 20 community partners,” De Marco said. “We provide them directly with funds to administer these community gardens, to work with youth on advocacy. We just don’t know how to tell our community partners that come all October 1, all the plans we had? We’re not going to be able to do that anymore.”
SNAP changes, too
The federal budget also makes cuts to Medicaid, SNAP and other safety net programs that could have a major impact on the health of North Carolinians, critics of the legislation say.
SNAP, which grew out of a food stamp program started during the Great Depression, became a nationwide program in 1974.
Nearly 1.4 million North Carolinians participate in the program, according to Karen Wade, the state Department of Health and Human Services policy director, and 600,000 of them are children. Veterans, older adults and people with disabilities also are in that population.
Nearly 80 percent of the households that receive SNAP are working families, Wade said.
For just North Carolina, the new federal budget shifts at least $475 million in costs of the food assistance program to the state, and an additional $65 million for program administration, Wade told reporters at a Zoom briefing last week.
When state lawmakers left Raleigh in late June for a holiday break, they had not yet adopted a state budget for the coming fiscal biennium, which began July 1. Republican leaders in the state Senate and state House of Representatives had come to a stalemate on negotiating the differences between their two spending plans, leaving many to wonder whether there will be a state budget approved at all this year.
In the interim, the General Assembly faces knotty choices, such as whether to dig into state coffers to cover the federal gap, reduce enrollment to lower the costs or simply withdraw from the food assistance program.
Funding brainstorming
Given that scenario, De Marco and others have been trying to figure out other potential funding sources for some of the SNAP-Ed programs.
“We have looked to see, could our governor, would the state budget be able to pick up the $11 million dollars a year,” De Marco said. “This doesn’t sound like too much, but when you think of how much they might have to pick up to cover SNAP benefits, there’s just really no way that our state would probably be likely to do that.”
“We’d like to reach out to some philanthropy,” De Marco added. “There’s some North Carolina-focused philanthropies that we’re interested in.”
Another avenue De Marco and others are pursuing is reaching out to the counties, towns and communities where their projects are and seeing if there are funds available there.
“We might need to tell these different communities what they’ve been provided with SNAP-Ed dollars to see if they could provide some resources,” De Marco added.
At any given time, De Marco said, her program supports between 12 and 15 community gardens that provide fresh fruits and vegetables, mostly in rural parts of the state. Over the past seven years, she said, 300,000 pounds of produce have been harvested from those plots.
In the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention’s Food, FItness and Opportunities 2023 to 2024 annual report, 13 gardens reported harvesting a total of 47,667 pounds of produce that were delivered to at least 1,328 community members through 353 volunteers.
Although many people are more attuned to urban community gardens, many of which are not even an acre, some plots in rural North Carolina look very different.
The Coharie Tribal Community Garden, for example, is at least 7.5 acres, and it serves as fertile ground for growing sorghum and sweet potatoes.
There also is a garden in the Fairview Community in northern Orange County, a neighborhood that has rallied to overcome crime challenges and a lack of recreational opportunities.
Reaching, teaching kids
Judit Alvarado, a Fairview resident for 11 years, has worked with the SNAP-Ed program at UNC for seven years. Alvarado helps the teens involved with the Youth In Action program that got started because some of the high school students in the neighborhood wanted to make their roads and streets safer — in part to promote more physical activity.
Alvarado has been helping the teens make connections with community leaders who can help them accomplish those goals.
“It’s hard to promote being active if you don’t feel safe,” De Marco said.
Much of the political rhetoric supporting cuts to safety net programs maintains that they encourage people not to work — something that administrators of the nutrition programs sharply dispute. They gather data to bolster support for the programs.
“We’re required statutorily to report on our results every year, so it’s very standardized,” De Marco said. “A lot of people who receive SNAP-Ed funds — sort of the bread and butter of their work — is direct-education with a lot of children. So there’s a lot of this work in schools. So talking with youth, introducing them to healthy foods, growing their own foods.”
The children are surveyed after every course.
“There’s information out there showing that the SNAP-Ed programs have impact about increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables consumed by the kids that go to these classes,” De Marco said. “At least 40 percent of those we touch are actually increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables they eat.”
De Marco would rather see a different message disseminated about the safety net programs and the education initiatives that often accompany them.
“Our realities, our futures are bound up with each other, so the more healthy environments we can create and opportunities to enact all the health behaviors we want people to do, the more likely we all are to be able to get the resources we need when we need them because people are there working,” De Marco said.
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