Sara Cooper is often one of the first customers at the Corner Farmers Market in Greensboro. She pulls up in her SUV, just before 8 a.m., a mug of coffee in hand, and walks to the bright yellow tent where the market manager, Kathy Newsom, greets her.
Normally, Cooper presents her EBT card and gets up to $50 in matched funding to buy produce. But on a recent Saturday, she received a plastic bag full of wooden tokens—$75, no strings attached—to help feed her family.
Cooper is one of 41 million people in the U.S. who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to make ends meet. The program, which began in the late 1930s after the Great Depression, allocates funds to individuals and families who make at or below 130 percent of the poverty line for groceries each month. Eighty percent of SNAP recipients are families with children.
In late October, President Donald Trump’s administration announced it would stop funding SNAP indefinitely as the federal shutdown entered its second month. But after a federal court ruling compelled the administration to release the funds, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the SNAP program, announced Monday it would tap into a $5 billion contingency reserve to partially cover eligible households’ allotments for November.
It is unclear when the funds will be dispersed, but a spokesperson with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services told The Assembly in an email the funds could be loaded as early as next week. Additional funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) was released on Monday.
Republicans and Democrats in Washington continue to blame each other for the federal government shutdown and what it means for those who rely on federal programs.
Families like Cooper’s, who rely on every dollar they can get, are just trying to survive the political fight’s impact on their kitchen tables.
‘A Lot of Guilt and Shame’
On Saturday, Cooper weaved in and out of the tents at the Corner Farmers Market, buying bunches of organic broccolini, carrots, cabbage, and red onions. Her most expensive item? A few pounds of grass-fed beef.
She knows what it looks like, she said.
“Getting gluten-free granola bars, organic brands of things,” she said. “I can see how that would have frustrated me 10 years ago if I had known I was receiving SNAP.”
But she has no choice, she said.
Both of Cooper’s daughters are autistic. They also have specific dietary restrictions—especially her two-year-old, who had her first anaphylactic reaction when she was just 10 days old, Cooper said. Corn, her daughter’s mortal enemy, is found in many food products as preservatives, additives, or livestock feed. That’s why she buys grass-fed beef.
Over time, she worked with her daughter’s doctors to narrow down just five foods her daughter could safely eat. Four of those she sources from the Corner Farmers Market.
While her younger daughter has the most severe food allergies, her older daughter and Cooper herself also have limited diets. Her husband is the only one who can eat shelf-stable foods. That’s why, when they spend their SNAP funds, they know the dollars don’t stretch as far as they might for other families.
“We don’t have the luxury of being able to eat a box of wheat pasta for dinner,” she said. “We’re accessing as many community resources as possible, but many of them will only work for my husband.”
Although Cooper’s family may have more dietary restrictions than others, their use of SNAP is not uncommon. In North Carolina about 1.4 million people rely on SNAP, including more than 90,000 people in Guilford County.
On Nov. 1, after it was announced SNAP would be halted, dozens of families lined up at the Corner Farmers Market’s yellow tent to receive their $75 worth of wooden tokens. For several, it was their first time there. One woman thanked Newsom for the tokens, explaining her SNAP funds had just run out. Another said they didn’t know what they would do without it.
For years, the Corner Market has run its Green for Greens program, which matches up to $50 in SNAP funds every week for those in need. On a regular market day, Newsom said, they do about 25 SNAP transactions. By 8:45 a.m. on Saturday, less than an hour after opening, the market had given out approximately 50 bags of $75 tokens—about one per minute. By the end of the day, the market had allocated more than 150 bags.
The need is immense, Newsom said.
“Unfortunately, in our community, there’s so much food insecurity,” she said. “People who receive SNAP by and large are working families, working poor. They go to grocery stores like everybody else, they just don’t have as much money.”
Cooper said her family has used SNAP on and off for the last seven years, and it was never something they planned for.
“There was a lot of guilt and shame in applying for it the first time,” she said.
‘A Slap in the Face’
Cooper grew up in a poor rural area of Gaston County and came to Greensboro for school in 2012. In 2018, the store where her husband was employed declared bankruptcy and laid off its staff. Cooper was pregnant with her first daughter and suffered pregnancy complications, having to cut back her working hours. That was the first time she applied for SNAP funding. They received about $540 per month.
While the money was helpful, Cooper said it was a big life adjustment.
“With how hard of a worker my husband was and how well we had felt like we managed our money to that point, we had taken pride in not needing help from anybody, especially coming from humble beginnings,” Cooper said.
Utilizing SNAP initially “felt like a slap in the face,” she said.
“Like this was the level we had to stoop to,” she added. “But we quickly ate many slices of that humble pie because it was either use that or go hungry.”
Her husband, a veteran, found it difficult to find another job with a comparable salary. He ended up driving for Lyft, Uber, and DoorDash to make ends meet until he landed a job in Utah the following year. The family moved and was able to stop using SNAP for a while. Then the pandemic hit, and her husband lost his job, and with it, their income and health insurance. In late 2020, they moved back to North Carolina with $12 in their bank account. For a while, they stayed in a friend’s bedroom. They applied for SNAP again, qualifying for about $525 per month.
That amount went up to $875 because they were temporarily fostering a friend’s child. In late 2022, their second daughter—a surprise—was born. A few months later, their SNAP funds dropped to $595 for a family of four. By the spring of this year, their SNAP funding was cut by more than half. Now they receive $235 per month. And now, as the federal government shutdown continues, they’ll receive just a portion of that amount.
It’s just not enough, Cooper said.
“All [DSS] could tell me is what they’ve told me for years: ‘This is where your family falls on the poverty scale.'”
Currently, Cooper cares for her daughters at home while her husband works full-time and also picks up gig work.
“It is still a struggle to feed my family,” she said.
Lydia Clendenin can relate. As a single mother of four, she works full time at a hair salon in Winston-Salem.
She used to male about $70,000 per year as a project manager. But last year, when she was eight months pregnant, she was laid off from her job. She found the job market drastically different from when she was last looking. Despite her best efforts, nothing panned out.
So she applied for any benefits she could, including SNAP. At first, she was receiving just over $1,000 per month for a family of five. This year, that amount was cut in half after she got the job at the salon.
When she learned that SNAP was going to be halted last month, she felt panic.
“What’s humiliating now is having it taken away,” she said. “And to know that I have to scramble, knowing I’m doing everything I can to improve our situation.”
Clendenin works to shield her kids from the reality of their situation but is also honest with them about using SNAP, she said. Recently, her son picked walnuts in their backyard so they would have snacks. Her other son brought home extra food from a Boy Scouts meeting to share with the rest of the family.
Her oldest child is looking for a job.
“Everyone is thinking of how to help, which is really sweet but also heartbreaking,” Clendenin said.
At this point, she said, she’s looking into local food banks, a resource she’s never used before.
“I always felt like it was for someone else, so it’s kind of weird to be that person now,” she said. “But there’s no time to be sad, no time to be scared. I just have to keep going.”
As families wait for their benefits to be fully reinstated, food banks will be overwhelmed, according to Eric Aft, the CEO of Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina.
“There is tremendous worry around individuals who are SNAP recipients,” Aft said.
SNAP Run Outs, Food Banks Step Up
Running a network of food banks requires strict accounting. Aft, who has led Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina for almost eight years, knows this personally. After the announcement of the SNAP pause, Aft said, the organization plans to provide holiday meal boxes earlier. The organization, which serves 18 counties in northwestern North Carolina and about 500 partner agencies, will also spend about $500,000 to purchase additional food this year.
“This will create strains down the road for us that we will have to figure out,” Aft said.
Food banks are meant to be a stopgap to food insecurity. Most people who rely on food pantries visit them fewer than four times a year. Thirty percent of patrons only use pantries once a year, Aft said. But that’s only because programs like SNAP exist, he said.
“SNAP provides nine meals for every meal that food pantries provide,” Aft said. “Our food bank, in collaboration with our partners, provided just under 40 million meals last year, and SNAP provides nine for every one of those meals. That gives people the size and scope of that program.”
Less SNAP funding means more people will turn to and rely on food banks, which will become overwhelmed, Aft said. In September, the organization already saw the highest number of people—85,300—it has ever served, according to Aft.
“Those families will not receive benefits at a level that we cannot fully respond to,” he said.
Most food pantry funding comes from individual community donations, Aft said. In the past, Second Harvest received more federal and state dollars. But earlier this year, the federal government halted a large portion of it. To ease the burden, Governor Josh Stein announced last week that the state will grant $10 million to local food banks. Still, Aft said, it will take the entire community to alleviate a potential hunger crisis.
The organization is asking for monetary donations to buy more food and for people to reach out to their elected officials to resolve the government shutdown.
“We’re looking at a potentially catastrophic situation for the health, nutritional benefit for our families, our kids and our seniors,” Aft said. “It will affect us all whether you have a family member who relies on these benefits, or if you have kids in school where there are kids who receive these benefits, or if their families rely on SNAP benefits; they will have less.”
‘If Everyone Did One Thing’
While dozens of family members waited in line at the Corner Farmers Market, others queued up to put cash in a jar on the table. One woman, Nancy Stoutdemire, scanned a QR code on a flyer to donate to the market.
She had been coming since January but had never given before. Now, she said, she will.
“Hunger is a real need,” she said. “Access to nutritional food should never be taken away from anybody.”
Others, like Stoutdemire, have also stepped up to help. The Corner Farmers Market received more than $10,000 in donations in one day last week, Newsom said, after they announced they would hand out stipends to families whose SNAP funds had run out. Initially, the market was going to pull the funds from its reserves, but now they won’t have to.
Thanks to the community’s donations, the market will be able to run the stipend program again this weekend.
“In the end, Saturday was not about charity,” Newsom wrote in an email after the market. “We fed a lot of folks and it was sometimes really emotional on both sides of the tables.”
A few vendors at the market, like Sun and Soil Farm, gave discounts to shoppers with SNAP funds. A flyer posted at their tent noted produce for recipients would be $1 off.
“To help out, our farm could take a bit of a hit,” said Brittany Peters, co-owner of Sun and Soil. “If everybody did one thing to help people, the greed wouldn’t hurt people so bad.”
Matt Davis, the general manager of Greensboro’s Deep Roots Market, said they’re working to do their part, too.
For the last seven years, the grocery store has run its LIMe program, which gives low-income customers 15 percent off their bill. Starting last week, the grocery store increased that discount for SNAP customers to 25 percent. Davis says the program is funded by customers upon checking out.
“We’re calling on our owners and those who want to assist to round up their totals,” he said.
Shoppers can also donate additional funds to support the program.
Right now, the co-op has about 250 active LIMe members and has halted the program’s $15 annual fee. Anyone who uses SNAP simply has to show their card to get the discount.
“I know that it’s a drop in the bucket for folks who are facing this,” Davis said. “But it’s to do what we can to try to assist and make shopping for local, healthy, quality products more accessible.”
Members of Indivisible Guilford County ran an emergency food drive at Oden Brewing Company this past weekend. The turnout was overwhelming, said Tami Clayton, a member of the organization’s leadership team. So much so that they needed to make multiple runs to community fridges to drop off food.
Seeing the community rally together has been a salve to those who have felt the shame of relying on SNAP, like Cooper and Clendenin.
They never expected to rely on food stamps, they both said, but have been grateful for the program and hope it returns in full soon.
As she waits for SNAP to fully return, Clendenin said, she is working hard to provide for her family because she loves her kids, and they deserve to live happy, fulfilling lives.
“My children are children of God, too,” she said. “They deserve good things like a cake on their birthday because we are human. We have dignity and worth, regardless.”
