Food bank braces for surge in demand after Trump strips 700,000 of benefits

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/19/food-stamps-bank-georgia-african-americans

Food bank braces for surge in demand after Trump strips 700,000 of benefits

Khushbu Shah in Atlanta

Thu 19 Dec 2019 09.00 GMT

As Kyle Waide visited the Atlanta Community Food Bank recently, where he is CEO, he ran into a woman who had recently lost her administrative job at a university. She was looking for work, she told him, but it was hard to find. She was struggling to get by.

Though she had food stamp benefits, she still needed to visit Waide’s food bank until she landed a new job, she added, because she had a home and a child to pay for. With her job gone, she said, she needed all the extra help she could get to feed her family.

Thousands in Atlanta like her are already struggling to make ends meet, even before the Trump administration scales back benefits to low-income Americans to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) as food stamps are known. Approximately 700,000 Americans will soon lose their benefits as the government tightens the regulations around stable work requirements for recipients, stretching the already scarce resources of the communities that Waide’s operation helps.

Those communities are often African American, raising the prospect that Trump’s move will put extra stress on minority families. Approximately one in three households using Snap benefits are African American. In general, African American households are more likely to experience food insecurity, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In 2016, Snap helped more than 13 million African American households put food on the table, according to data from the US agriculture department’s fiscal year 2016 Snap Households Characteristic data.

Waide stresses the importance of Snap even as his food bank provides more than 63m meals to more than 750,000 Georgians annually. Snap, he says, provides 12 times the amount of assistance that food banks do nationwide.
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