By Will Atwater

For nearly three years, Kensley Wellons, 54, has helped ensure that Greensboro schoolchildren have nutritious meals each day.

Wellons, an elementary school cafeteria staff member, said a typical shift includes preparing meals, stocking canned goods deliveries, running the register during lunch service and connecting with students.

Her work doesn’t end when lunch is over.

A bus shortage sometimes requires students to be picked up in shifts after school, Wellons said. To make sure children waiting for later buses don’t go hungry, she provides snacks to an estimated 200 to 250 of them. 

Though Wellons spends her work hours providing nutritious meals to students, home is a different story. 

Some days, Wellons worries about having enough food for herself and her teenage son.

“My son’s getting older, and he eats a lot of food,” Wellons said. “Sometimes I’ll make dinner and give the majority of it to him. I can always just eat something I have left that’s maybe not my favorite, but whatever, you know. Sometimes I’m like, ‘I don’t know how I make this work, but I do.’”

Wellons is among the more than 1.4 million North Carolinians who receive help buying groceries through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Across the state and the country, changes to SNAP are adding uncertainty for recipients and new administrative demands for county agencies. 

Wellons said her monthly SNAP benefit is about $50 lower than it was a year ago, a change she noticed within the past six to eight months. During her most recent renewal, her pay stubs reflected a period when she had worked additional hours. As an hourly worker, she said, her earnings can fluctuate and may not stay at the level documented during a previous review. She worries that any temporary increase in hours could result in lower benefits until her next recertification.

Doing more with less

The smaller benefit leaves Wellons with less money for groceries and for gas to commute to work. It also means $50 less each month to spend at The Corner Farmers Market in Greensboro, where the market’s Green for Greens fund supports SNAP matching on a dollar-for-dollar basis, with a $50 weekly cap.

Spread out over a year, her SNAP reduction equals $600 less in SNAP benefits. 

It means she’s losing even more at the farmers market, which would be matching that SNAP money, so in effect, she’s losing up to $1,200 a year in benefits that would go toward purchasing healthy, fresh fruits and vegetables. 

Corner Farmers Market Manager Kathy Newsom says they’ve found another way for customers to stretch their food budgets, including people whose EBT cards have run out.

“Keep bringing your card,” Newsom said they tell customers. “Regardless of whether there’s money on it or not, we’ll match your cash, because we want you to still come back. We want you to still eat.”

SNAP customers can use their EBT cards to buy market tokens, which they spend with participating farmers and vendors. At the end of the market day, Newsom reimburses vendors for the tokens they accept. The Corner Farmers Market raises separate money — through grants, community donations and fundraisers — to support the Double Bucks match, she said.

For Wellons, the program makes locally grown produce more affordable. That gives her peace of mind, especially amid the recent Cyclospora outbreak linked to iceberg lettuce.

“I don’t want to buy any produce from the grocery stores because of all of the craziness going on,” Wellons said. “I’m honestly afraid to eat it.”

When a federal funding lapse delayed SNAP payments last fall, The Corner Farmers Market made a simple promise: They announced on Facebook that anyone whose benefits were interrupted could receive $75 in tokens to buy fresh food, until their funds ran out. About 300 people came, many of them first-time shoppers, Newsom said.

“When we posted that flyer on Facebook saying we’ll give away $75 to anyone impacted until the faucet gets turned back on for your SNAP, or we run out of money, we did not put anything out saying, ‘Help us fund this,’” Newsom said. “In two days, we raised $70,000.”

The market match can stretch Wellons’ dollars for fresh, high-quality food, something that’s become a priority for federal policymakers, but she still has to find ways to cover the rest of her groceries, transportation and household costs.

Stretching resources

Wellons has developed a careful system of grocery hacks to stretch her SNAP benefits and her paycheck. She saves her income tax refund money and uses it to supplement her monthly income. Additionally, she shops almost exclusively through the Harris Teeter app, buying mostly items that are on sale.

“I basically only buy things that are on sale,” she said.

She relies on buy-one-get-one-free offers and compares prices with apps from other retailers, including Food Lion and Lowe’s Foods. Instead of clipping coupons from the Sunday paper, Wellons treats digital circulars much the same, and she saves larger grocery trips for Fridays, when Harris Teeter offers quadruple fuel points. A $100 purchase can earn her 40 cents off each gallon of gas at BP, she said.

To curb impulse spending, Wellons places orders online and uses free curbside pickup.

“If I go in to shop, I’m going to spend my money,” she said.

At home, she plans meals around sales and seasonal food at the Corner Farmers Market. She keeps a dry-erase list of meals she can make, and she and her son choose from options she has already accounted for in the budget.

Wellons is among SNAP recipients who work while relying on food assistance to help cover grocery costs. Nationally, 28 percent of SNAP households had income from work in fiscal year 2023; among those households, average monthly earnings were $1,548, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Nationwide, 42.1 million people received SNAP benefits each month during fiscal year 2025, according to the USDA.

‘It’s stressful’

The federal changes include more frequent eligibility reviews for some SNAP recipients, a shift that’s adding work for participants and for county agencies that administer the program.

The requirement to review some cases twice rather than once a year will create “a massive administrative burden,” said Andrew Harrell, program and communications manager for the Carolina Hunger Initiative, a UNC Chapel Hill–based organization that works with schools and community partners to address food insecurity across North Carolina.

Federal changes to SNAP will increase counties’ administrative responsibilities and costs beginning Oct. 1, even though county agencies get no direct state funding for SNAP staffing or administration, according to a UNC School of Government analysis.

Maintaining SNAP benefits requires Wellons to navigate a process she said can be difficult and prone to errors.

“You have to redo it every six months. You have to show your pay stubs, prove your rent, and there’s this whole huge long questionnaire you have to fill out every single time,” she said. “It’s stressful every six months that something is gonna not work right, and then you’re gonna have to spend time trying to figure out which way you’re gonna fix it.”

During one online renewal, Wellons said, the system incorrectly listed income from a job she had left years earlier. The error initially showed that she did not qualify for benefits, forcing her to appear in person.

“It added all that to my income and said I didn’t qualify,” she said. “I had to go down there and say, ‘Look, I don’t work this job. I haven’t worked there in years.’ It’s like one little thing you do wrong — or that their system has wrong — and it messes up the whole thing.”

Getting help by phone can be just as difficult, Wellons said.

“I’ve been on hold before for 20 to 30 minutes trying to get someone,” she added. “I get a voicemail, and then you have to wait a couple days for them to call you back. It’s stressful.”

Many people do not understand how common it is to need SNAP — or who uses it, Wellons said. Some of her co-workers work two jobs and still depend on the benefits to get by, she noted.

Wellons added that parents often need the most help, but people without children may qualify for SNAP too.

“Not everybody has a lot of resources.”

NC Health News reporter Jennifer Fernandez contributed to this article.

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