The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education, known as SNAP-Ed, provides a unique approach to healthy living. The initiative, which is an extension of the government’s SNAP program, aims to help program recipients budget properly and make healthy food choices.
For state-contracted partners in Pennsylvania, like Vetri Community Partnership, this means being able to provide unique services and experiences to school students, said Maddy Booth, the organization’s CEO.
“For our particular program, we create about 15,000 experiences per year with the funds,” she said. “That could be a tasting, it could be a cooking class, it could be a trip to a farm,”
Recent, extensive cuts to the parent program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), will affect millions of recipients in Pennsylvania. They will also affect programming by organizations like VCP.
SNAP-Ed funding is scheduled to go away on October 1.
Helping the community
Vetri Community Partnership works with Philly school leaders to bring programming including fruit and vegetable promotion, school garden curriculum, evidence-based cooking classes, and workshops for families or caregivers on-site.
Booth explained there is lots of anecdotal evidence and data to show the benefits of VCP’s programming in particular, and SNAP-Ed programs generally.
“We see a lot of students enjoying something for the first time, whether it’s a fruit or vegetable prepared at all or prepared in that way,” she said. “We see a lot of people saying, ‘I can cook now!’ and feeling confident and feeling engaged and curious in cooking at home.”
In 2024, 21 partner agencies provided SNAP-Ed programs in Pennsylvania with things like nutrition education, change strategies and social marketing. Data shows that the programs encourage healthy habits that have tangible benefits.
In the fiscal year 2024, 44% of students in 8th to 12th grade who participated in SNAP-Ed nutrition education programs said they ate more vegetables than they had.
Additionally, 39% of students in 4th to 6th grade participated in 60 minutes or more of physical activity on more days of the week.
Booth said these cuts to SNAP will not only affect family’s spending, but also the opportunities to provide this education and promote healthier living.
“The ripple effects could be quite significant, especially paired with the cuts to SNAP dollars,” she said. “The goal of this program was to help folks stretch the already limited budget that they were potentially receiving to support their family’s food consumption and intake. So, I think that we are certainly going to be more aware of what neighborhoods and communities need more support in accessing food and then accessing nutrition education, because I think those two things go hand in hand.”
‘Pay a doctor or pay a farmer’
The Food Trust is a Philadelphia organization focused on making healthy food available to all. They also offer nutrition education through SNAP-Ed funding.
That programming is particularly important in promoting healthy living for all, said the organization’s president and CEO, Mark Edwards.
“You’re going to pay, so you either pay a doctor or you pay a farmer, right?” he said. “And paying a farmer is going to have a far-better impact for everybody involved, as opposed to health care, with the skyrocketing costs of health care that we see.”
The organization’s SNAP-Ed programming works with all ages, from youth to older adults, said the organization’s vice president of programs, Heidi Gorniok.
“I think one of the most important things about it is that it’s reaching people where they are,” she said. “That’s really the crux of the program. We’re going to the stores where people shop, we’re going to schools where people learn. We are there in all those different types of settings, and it’s very customized to the needs of the individuals that we’re working with.”
This includes work in schools – including information on gardening, food safety, budgeting and healthy eating. Other work includes adult education – particularly at farmers or food markets throughout the city, Gorniok said.
“We want to make sure they’re also getting that education around how you cook with some of this produce that you may never have seen before,” she said, “that the farmer is bringing and showing them some of those healthy recipes and letting them taste it and then go and buy it from the farmer.”
Gorniok explained the program – which has been around for over 30 years — has a long history of positive outcomes.
“We’re seeing impacts in terms of people purchasing and eating more fruits and vegetables,” she said. “It starts at the purchase point and then consumption, all the way up through studies that have been done that show changes to people’s blood pressure or A1C, in conjunction with these programs.”
‘The state can’t fill the gap’
SNAP-Ed programming has been called “ineffective and duplicative” by the House Committee on Agriculture, which added that it produced “no meaningful change in the nutrition or obesity of SNAP participants.”
SNAP-Ed partners and advocates argue the small program fills a massive need.
Edwards said the SNAP-Ed cuts will decimate The Food Trust’s nutrition education programming. The organization is working “feverishly” to make new connections with philanthropic and corporate partners. He’s not optimistic.
“The reality is there’s just no way that those organizations can fill this gap,” he said. “It’s just too large. The state can’t fill the gap … When the funding stops, we will no longer be able to provide those services, and it will result in a loss of jobs.”
For VCP, the impacts are similar. Booth said much of its programming will go away when funding is eliminated.
“The federal investment in this work allows us to expand it at a much larger scale that has had a collective impact on our community, our city, and the nation,” she said. “Just having this go away, we just are very concerned about the implications of that, and how we can potentially patchwork things together so that everyone receives some type of nutrition education, whether it’s through cooking, with us or one of the other local partners.”
Impacts loom
The October 1 end date gives programs like The Food Trust and VCP less than two months to find other funding or prepare for the elimination of programs.
Edwards said it will also undo a lot of important work in keeping people healthy and eating well, and will also have broader financial and community impacts.
“There’s also the economic impact that our work has, as it relates to supporting farmers and their ability to bring their yields into the city and have direct access to markets and communities that we are connected to,” he said. “We facilitate those connections, and in some instances, it creates part-time job opportunities for people to participate with farmers, to help them sell their products at our farmers markets, and ensures the farmers’ ability to be able to maintain the support that they need to address the things that they grow.”
Gorniok said the speed of the coming changes is almost unimaginable.
“The program’s been around for 30 years,” she said. “So it’s figuring out, how do you just stop a program that’s been so long-term and embedded in communities for 30 years?”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
