Amara Donovan understands the pain and uncertainty many SNAP recipients are feeling right now. Because she’s been there herself.
As a first-year college student at UMass Amherst, Donovan had just given birth to her son and was trying to figure out how to care for him while staying in school. “I just had no idea what it was going to look like for me to be able to support my child and finish school,” the Western Mass native told Embrace.
That’s when her friends helped her apply to SNAP. Thanks to that lifeline, she graduated from UMass in 2016 with degrees in public health and sociology without having to take time off. But the struggle continued when she and her son moved to Boston for her job and had to navigate the dreaded “benefits cliff,” where people don’t make enough money to live comfortably but make a little too much for assistance programs.
Erin McAleer says she remembers her own single mother, who had escaped an abusive marriage, being unwilling to even fill out free school lunch forms out of fear and embarrassment.
“She thought, ‘Am I going to be judged? Are they gonna take my kids away because I can't feed you?’” McAleer recalled.
Both women found their calling using their experiences and good fortune to help others. Donovan runs her own consulting business and works with the Impact Collective, a nonprofit that mobilizes wealth to close the racial wealth gap. McAleer serves as President and CEO of the Boston-based food assistance organization Project Bread.
“This is a man-made crisis,” said McAleer. “This is 100% preventable. In every other government shutdown, SNAP benefits continue to be paid. There’s actually a stabilization fund exactly for moments like these.”
But the SNAP crisis goes beyond the current moment, in McAleer’s mind. It also highlights once again the lack of political will to fix the problem—and the stigma around poverty and hunger that justifies that approach.
“Hunger is a policy choice,” she said. “If we wanted to solve it, we could do it very quickly. We have the programs, we have the food, we know how—it’s just a matter of whether we’re willing to invest the resources.
“There’s this huge false narrative that people who are on SNAP are not working,” she added, noting that most of the people on the program are senior citizens, people with disabilities, or children. “The people who are on the program who don't fit into those categories are indeed working. And they're not making enough money. Home healthcare workers, daycare workers, people working in restaurants, people that we all rely on every single day. I don’t think there’s anyone out there who for $6 a day is not going to work. It’s just not reality. But $6 a day is also a lifeline for people.”
Donovan knows that stigma well. “You often see people have their ‘Aha!’ moments when they know somebody close to them who’s experiencing some type of struggle,” she said. “It’s really about humanizing people who are different from you.”
So what can people do to help their neighbors when the government plays politics with hunger? For Donovan, the answer starts close to home.
“First, people need to learn and educate themselves about SNAP and who receives SNAP,” she said. “And second, it's about getting connected and talking to people in your neighborhood and in your community. Having a conversation with your neighbor or talking to somebody new in a Facebook group. Making those one-to-one connections and community connections is the start of supporting one another.”
McAleer agrees.
“I think part of the people understanding the reality is just talking to folks, right? Getting back to just understanding people's stories, having empathy, having an open mind and understanding the difficult trade-offs people are making every single day.
“But don't lose sight of the policy piece to this because this is all manmade and preventable. We need people raising their voices to really end it.”
