Hunger doesn’t take a break: The promise of summer EBT
By Addie Costello/Wisconsin Health Fellowship
Millions of U.S. families qualify for a new, summer food assistance program designed to combat rising child hunger.
Experts discussed the program’s potential impact, its limits and the difficulties prepping for its rollout during the panel, “Hunger doesn’t take a break: The promise of summer EBT,” at Health Journalism 2024.
More than 2 million children rely on school meals in New York alone, said panelist Krista Hesdorfer, director of public affairs for Hunger Solutions New York. But during the summer, many of those children experience what the panelists called a “hunger gap.”
It costs an average of $168 a month to feed a child during the summer, Hesdorfer said — an extra expense many families can’t afford.
Established federal summer initiatives allow community groups to provide meals to kids in low-income areas. But awareness, transportation and stigma prevent a significant portion of eligible households from utilizing the programs, Hesdorfer said.
Summer EBT, also called SUN bucks, addresses some of those issues, Hesdorfer said.
States plan to automatically enroll a significant portion of eligible families using existing data. Then the state agencies will either mail a food assistance card or upload the stipend to a card already in use. Instead of having to go to specific community centers to get food, each family will receive $120 to spend at grocery stores, farmers markets and other food retailers, said Sherry Tomasky, SNAP bureau chief in the NYS Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.
But that stipend won’t completely address the monthly gap in families’ grocery budgets, noted panel moderator Bridget Huber, a staff writer at The Food and Environment Reporting Network.
And in 13 states, families won’t get any stipend to address the increase in child hunger.
States chose whether or not to distribute Summer EBT. Some of the states that opted out of the program just couldn’t set up their system by this summer but plan to start next summer, Tomasky said.
A rising number of families are struggling with hunger right now, Hesdorfer said.
Pandemic food assistance ended last summer, leaving families without benefits they relied on for years, Tomasky said.
“We can now settle into a permanent program, and we don’t have to hopefully live with shifting program rules from year to year,” Tomasky said.
One major shift from pandemic food assistance: Summer EBT benefits expire after four months.
State agencies need to remind people not automatically enrolled to fill out an application in time and get a benefit card to millions of households so they have time to spend the stipends before they expire, Tomasky said. “These are the sorts of challenges that keep us up at night.”
Addie Costello is WPR’s Mike Simonson Memorial Investigative Reporting Fellow embedded in the newsroom of Wisconsin Watch. She was a 2024 AHCJ-Wisconsin Health Journalism Fellow.
