federal contingency fund<\/a> for SNAP can only support half of the $8 billion it provides to families each month. Councilmember Cindy Bass (D-8th) said that while she understood that it was an unexpected crisis, she believed the city is “ultimately responsible for our citizens” and called for a more concrete plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n“It’s great that we can have help from the commonwealth, it’s great when we get federal assistance, but all of that being off the table, we have to make it happen,” Bass said. “… I understand your concerns and your worry, but there’s always some place that we could cut, at least temporarily, to figure that out and make it happen. I just wanted to emphasize that because I’m troubled by the idea that our only response is ‘Well, they’ve got to do their jobs.'”<\/p>\n
Loree Jones, the CEO of food organization Philabundance, said she was heartened by the city’s coordinated response during this crisis, but it won’t be enough. She said that for every $1 donated, Philabundance can provide two meals. With nearly 500,000 people in the city receiving SNAP benefits, even a $1 million donation would only provide about two meals per person in the city.<\/p>\n
“Food banks cannot possibly make up for a loss of this magnitude,” Jones said. “There’s simply no substitute for SNAP.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Even before the current SNAP crisis,\u00a0Jones said there was a 44% increase in food insecurity from 2021 to 2023 and that she’s seen a surge in dual-income households seeking help from the program.\u00a0Matysik said he’s seen a 120% increase in people using Share Food’s food pantries and fridges over the past year, all while federal resources have dwindled.<\/p>\n
“While there are many echoes of 2020 and 2021 in this moment, the difference is during the pandemic, Washington helped us solve this problem,”\u00a0Matysik said. “In this moment, Washington and Washington alone is creating this problem.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits were put on pause nearly a week ago, city and state officials…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[990,9127,7301,744,69,71,70,4610],"class_list":["post-27520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-city-council","tag-food-accessibility","tag-food-insecurity","tag-government","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-snap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}