The SNAP-Ed program — which focuses on nutrition education and overall wellness for people on food stamps — will end Sept. 30, cutting off hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual grants that supported programming across all Vermont counties, including recipe demonstrations, meal kits and active-living guides.

The program’s elimination was part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping budget adjustments that passed on July 4 in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As the state’s food assistance network finds its way through a new landscape of shortfalls, officials worry more residents will fall through the cracks.

SNAP-Ed is an extension of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which has experienced a number of cuts across the board. Instead of providing funds for individuals to purchase food, SNAP-Ed’s much smaller grants focus on community education and initiatives to improve eligible households’ engagement with 3SquaresVT — Vermont’s name for the larger body of resources under SNAP. 

“Just providing food for people is not the whole answer to food security,” said Suzanne Kelly, who was the SNAP-Ed coordinator at the Vermont Department of Health for a decade until last month. Her former position, and another related role, will soon be discontinued.

“SNAP-Ed is sort of that extra bit of information to really make sure that people can access the food, can use the food, and can enjoy it over time,” Kelly said.

The program is deeply focused on health outcomes, she said, including prevention of chronic conditions and disease, and promoting wellness through nutrition and exercise.

Kelly is concerned about the immediate impact on Vermonters. 

“These are decisions that trickle down to the most vulnerable people in our communities,” she said.

Kelly referenced a SNAP-Ed needs assessment earlier this year that identified certain populations in the state with a disproportionately high need for food assistance, including rural Vermonters and people with disabilities. Outreach programs that meet people where they are geographically will be an especially big loss, Kelly said.

The end of SNAP-Ed has already had tangible effects in recent weeks, causing the imminent shutdown of a food pantry in Holland and contributing to the Vermont Foodbank’s recent staff cuts. Of the seven employees the food bank let go, three were specifically operating SNAP-Ed programs, according to Chris Meehan, the company’s chief impact officer.

Vermont residents received over $147 million in SNAP aid last year. The projected allocation for Vermont’s SNAP-Ed budget in 2026, which the Department of Health received May 30, was less than half a million. Five weeks later, Kelly learned that the program was canceled.

‘We’ll have to be really creative’

Meehan said the SNAP-Ed cuts will effectively end the Vermont Foodbank’s VTFresh program, which has reached every county in the state with initiatives to increase access and understanding around nutrition. The program provided a space for people to exchange knowledge about cooking, recipes and budgeting, and was often particularly useful for families, she said.

While the food bank employees who ran the initiative are no longer with the organization, the program’s existing resources will remain on the Vermont Foodbank website. VTFresh’s continuing presence, Meehan said, will be “more passive than active.”

Meehan is grateful for the infrastructure that VTFresh has left behind — it has been “transformational” for the food assistance network in the state, she said. 

Denise Walton, a Concord resident who is a lead volunteer at Sid’s Pantry in town, said VTFresh recipe materials had been invaluable in allowing her community to make better use of fresh foods. It’s common, she said, for people to ask questions about how to prepare food as they’re taking it.

“I think people want to cook,” said Walton, who herself is on food stamps. “They may not have learned, or been taught, or had the time.”

Walton said she would keep trying to provide resources to help people fully use the food they’re receiving — but that it will be more challenging going forward. 

“We’ll have to be really creative,” Walton said.

Vermont Foodbank’s situation is par for the course statewide at smaller food assistance providers.

The Vermont Garden Network will lose its dedicated nutrition educator, according to executive director T Hanson, one of only five staff at the organization. Come Alive Outside, a nonprofit which used SNAP-Ed funds to reach thousands of school-age kids in Rutland County with tips on how to stay active, has told its staff it may not have sufficient funds to pay everyone in six months, according to Executive Director Arwen Turner. 

Meanwhile, in Burlington, the People’s Farmstand will continue as a purely volunteer effort, according to founding Director Nour El-Naboulsi. There hadn’t been salaried roles, he clarified, but they had previously been able to offer staff — primarily farmers — a stipend for their time. The organization offers free fresh produce (both self-grown and donated) at weekly open events but has also been conducting educational outreach through its Veggie of the Month program. 

El-Naboulsi said the initiative features a combination of staple Vermont crops and “culturally relevant produce — things from Nepal, Somalia, Iraq (and) other places in the Middle East and East Africa.” The organization serves a relatively large proportion of immigrant and refugee populations, he said, and the program is designed to combine familiar food with information about how to prepare local produce.

With the loss of SNAP-Ed funding to the People’s Farmstand and sister organization Village Hydroponics, El-Naboulsi said he has had to reprioritize.

“We kind of lose the capacity to do supplementary education, recipe preparation, outreach,” he said.

‘A great return on investment’

Keith Robinson, a pediatric pulmonologist at UVM Children’s Hospital, emphasized a connection between SNAP-Ed and health outcomes for families. He’s the hospital’s vice chair for Quality Improvement and Population Health and built the provider’s screening platform for food insecurity.

“We are trying to go deeper and further upstream to make sure that we’re solving the root causes of food insecurity in Vermont,” Robinson said.

For him, nutrition education has been a big part of that work — that’s why the end of SNAP-Ed is such a blow, despite the small scale of previous funding.

“It’s gonna make communities potentially less healthy, and it’s also gonna create gaps in the systems that we need to have around families,” he said. “While the dollar value may not be great, the impact of those dollars is extraordinary.”

Robinson referenced a state report on SNAP-Ed last year, calling survey data that indicated diet and exercise changes for participants “a big deal.” Roughly a third of people who received direct nutrition education reported they ate more fruits and vegetables each day, and 20% said they exercised more, according to the report.

“That’s a great return on investment,” Robinson said.

Modifications and cuts to the SNAP program at large have been made in the name of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” — a narrative that Kelly disputed. 

“The strategies that are used (in SNAP-Ed) have shown outcomes — real outcomes,” she said.

A page addressing cost concerns on the USDA website references studies showing that for every dollar spent on SNAP-Ed and similar programs, 10 times that can be saved in future health care costs. The total nationwide cost of the program would have been $550 million in the 2026 fiscal year.

“It’s probably not the best idea to be cutting programs that are going to eventually help reduce costs way further down the line,” Kelly said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to requests for comment.

A document briefly detailing SNAP overhaul from the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture called SNAP-Ed a program that has wrought “no meaningful change” for its target population. The committee cited a 2019 report from the Government Accountability Office that appears to primarily conclude that the effectiveness of the program is difficult to properly evaluate due to uneven standards of reporting from state agencies and a lack of coordination at the federal level. 

“When federal benefits get cut like this, we need to think about how to bolster connections in our community, and think differently about how to fill those gaps,” Robinson said. 

Jeanne Montross, executive director of Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects, or HOPE, in Middlebury, said her organization has been seeing the effects of staff and program cuts elsewhere in the state’s assistance networks. Montross’ nonprofit is primarily funded by private contributions.

“It always ends up flowing down to HOPE,” she said of increased need in her local community.

Anore Horton, executive director at Hunger Free Vermont, said the state’s food assistance network “cannot in any way mitigate the loss of all of these different sources of funding.”

Any solution to a problem of this scale must be “collective,” Horton said, but must also involve significant new assistance from the state government. But in a situation this urgent, Horton said it wouldn’t necessarily make sense for the state to replace nutrition education funding.

Walton said Sid’s Pantry has also been increasingly relying on community support and donations.

“We’re very fortunate to have a little buffering like that,” she said, “especially for an aging community that needs healthy food and needs access to things out in the rural areas.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Loss of SNAP-Ed program leaves gaps in Vermont’s food assistance network.

A recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report on food insecurity and hunger reinforces what so many people in Vermont already know and are experiencing firsthand — affording food for ourselves and our families is becoming much harder. 

The national report outlines a 40% increase in food insecurity across the U.S. from 2021 to 2022, further reinforcing recent Census data showing the largest-ever one-year increase in poverty. 

This drastic and inhumane increase in hunger and poverty makes the following clear: When the federal government chooses inaction by rolling back essential programs, it has devastating impacts on too many of our neighbors. 

Advocates and service providers across the state have been talking with community members and are continuously hearing about the struggle to keep food on the table each and every day, week, or month. 

Increasing food prices and the rolling back of essential anti-poverty programs, like the Child Tax Credit and increased 3SquaresVT benefit amounts, disproportionately impact those who are not adequately supported by systems built to improve access to basic needs like stable housing, enough nourishing food, and economic security. 

The USDA report highlights that in 2022, food insecurity for households that were American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, Hispanic, or multiracial was more than double the rate for white households. 

In a statement released by the USDA, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack stated, “These findings are unacceptable, yet the report is the latest piece of evidence that as the pandemic began to wane in 2022, another public health concern — food insecurity — increased. The experience of the pandemic showed us that when the government invests in meaningful support for families, we can make a positive impact on food security, even during challenging economic times.” 

We could not agree more. We are heartened to know that national leaders like Vilsack are sounding the alarm and pushing for change. 

In Vermont, when the state or federal government invests in meaningful support, there is a positive impact on food security. And when neighbors are struggling, we must act. 

Recent investments by our state — including a new child care law, Act 76, the Vermont Child Tax credit, and Universal School Meals — will have a positive impact. We all must continue this longer-term policy and systems work in order to solve hunger. 

We must also make sure everyone in Vermont has access to nourishing food they need and want today. The Vermont Foodbank, Hunger Free Vermont and our partners across the state are working to meet those needs each day, and we look forward to working with the administration and the Legislature to address longer-term systemic challenges.

Join the Vermont Foodbank, Hunger Free Vermont and our partners, community members and legislators for an End Hunger Briefing on Nov. 29 for an update on the status of hunger in Vermont.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Sayles & Horton: For many Vermonters, it’s much harder to afford food.

Hunger is a solvable problem, yet in the federal debt limit deal, one of the negotiated “tradeoffs” is to take food off our neighbors’ tables. 

People over 50 and under 55 who receive SNAP benefits, known in Vermont as 3SquaresVT, will now have to prove that they either worked or volunteered for 80 hours in the previous month. This means official pay stubs, approved volunteer sheets, or other “proof,” submitted every month simply to receive anywhere from $23 to a few hundred dollars per month to purchase food, or these benefits will be subject to time limits. 

The debt ceiling agreement comes at the expense of people all across America, including tens of thousands of people in Vermont trying to make ends meet. The expansion of cruel and arbitrary requirements and time limits will only deepen hunger and poverty, in Vermont and beyond. 

Telling people who are struggling to make ends meet that without documented hours of labor, they can use 3SquaresVT for only three months out of every three years will certainly not significantly lower the national debt.

Who will be required to prove they are eligible? Neighbors who are unable to work, yet not disabled enough to qualify on a government form; family members caring for children so parents can work; a friend working off the books for a small business; or someone in a rural area with no transportation or internet access.

In Vermont, the newly proposed work requirements will apply to about 2,500 more people than the current work requirements. Thirty years of research shows that imposing work requirements and time limits on food benefits simply takes food away from people, making it harder to get and keep a job. Food is a basic need and should never have a time limit.

Adding burdens to people ages 50-54 who receive food assistance as the price for allowing the government to pay its bills is immoral. These changes will do one thing: punish people with lower incomes and working-class people for systems outside of our control, like underpaid labor markets and lack of affordable housing, child care, transportation, and sick leave, to name only a few. Neighbors who qualify for 3SquaresVT benefits but, due to this policy change will be subject to work requirements and time limits, will continue to experience hunger. 

This federal policy choice also shifts the responsibility to ensure that no one in this wealthy country goes hungry to a network of organizations already reeling from the end of 3SquaresVT Emergency Allotments in April. Many of the Vermont Foodbank’s network partner food shelves and pantries saw record guest visits in May. 

This change puts impossible pressures on food banks and the small, local, community-based food programs that are already stretched thin by increased need. How can we ask the people who show up every day for neighbors across our state to do more when we have a federal system that already works — if politicians would only let it? 

Food banks and the charitable food system are not the solution to hunger. Tens of millions of people in the U.S. and well over 100,000 people in Vermont can’t afford enough nourishing food. People are working and contributing to our communities, yet they still can’t go to the store and afford to buy the food they need. 

Elected representatives need to stop cutting existing, successful programs and start listening to solutions to hunger being offered by communities across Vermont and around the country. Hunger is solvable. Hundreds of community organizations are ready to partner. Policymakers, let’s get down to the real work. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Horton & Sayles: Federal debt ceiling deal will heighten hunger, poverty.

The families of all Vermont public school students, and those of some independent school students, are expected to receive at least $120 in federal food benefits this summer.

The state plans to disburse $9.6 million in federal Covid-19 aid funding to the households of roughly 80,000 students in total, according to the Vermont Agency of Education. 

Families are slated to receive $120 per student on a prepaid electronic benefit transfer, or EBT, card. The funds can be used to buy food at grocery stores, farmers markets and convenience stores.

The pandemic funds, which will be distributed in August, are a one-time benefit. There are no income limits or requirements to receive the money, which will expire in roughly a year, according to Rosie Krueger, the state director of child nutrition programs at the Agency of Education.

“We always want to make sure that Vermont families get every bit of assistance that they’re entitled to from the federal government,” Krueger said in an interview.

The windfall is the result of a combination of federal pandemic aid programs and provisions in recent state law. In December, Congress authorized a round of pandemic aid for school meals, known as P-EBT, for the summer of 2023. The money was intended to help children who received subsidized meals in school access food over the summer. 

Only students enrolled at schools that participate in federal food aid programs were eligible for that aid, according to the federal requirements. 

In 2022, however, Vermont passed a law requiring public schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to students and providing state money to reimburse schools that did so. In order to be reimbursed by the state, schools were required to participate in federal school meal programs. 

As a result, all Vermont public school students, and some at independent schools, will receive this summer’s federal benefit cards. State officials did not provide a figure for how many independent schools are participating.

Pre-K students at those participating schools will also be eligible for the cards. 

The program appeared to receive some attention during Vermont’s legislative session. During discussion of a bill to make a free school breakfast and lunch program permanent, Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, the chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, pointed to such benefits as an example of what she described as a questionable allocation of resources. 

“Somebody we know who has a high level administrative job got an EBT card for, what, $120 for the summer?” Kitchel said in a committee hearing earlier this month. “And that family went to Rome last year on vacation and Paris this year.”

Several members of the governor’s staff received cards, she said, “and it raised considerable consternation around the benefit.” 

Earlier this month, the Legislature approved a universal school meals program, with $29 million in state funding. Kitchel opposed it.

She could not be reached for comment by phone or email Monday. Agency of Education officials said the $120 summer EBT cards have not yet been sent out. 

But state officials also distributed a separate round of $1.8 million in P-EBT funds in April. That benefit was provided to families whose children missed school for reasons related to Covid-19 between September 2022 and January 2023.

Another round of that aid, for absences from February through May 2023, will be sent out with the summer P-EBT aid, meaning that families with children who were absent for Covid-related reasons during that period will receive more than $120 on the cards. 

Anore Horton, executive director of the nonprofit Hunger Free Vermont, which has lobbied heavily for universal school meals, urged families to “please, please use your P-EBT cards.”

The cards are not only a resource for families to buy food, she said, but also a $9.6 million boon to Vermont’s economy. 

“Use them and go support your local farmers with your kids, and let them pick out some beautiful fresh produce at your local farmers market,” she said. “Or use them at the grocery store. Or if what you want to do is, you know, buy food with it and donate it to your local food shelf, do that. But please don’t waste these federal funds that can go toward supporting Vermont’s local food and farm economy.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Families of Vermont public school students to receive $120 in food benefits this summer.

On Wednesday morning, lawmakers in the cafeteria of the Vermont Statehouse were greeted with a small breakfast spread, free of charge: cups of granola parfait, homemade cinnamon rolls, and a bowl of apples with individually wrapped pieces of Cabot cheese.

Those offerings, courtesy of public school officials, were there to illustrate a campaign to make breakfast and lunch in Vermont schools permanently free. 

“We’re celebrating universal school meals today,” said Karyl Kent, school nutrition director at the Lamoille North School District, showing a reporter the assorted breakfast options. “And we’re asking legislators to make it permanent.”

Since 2020, Vermont children have had access to free breakfast and lunch at school. 

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, an infusion of public dollars paid for breakfast and lunch for all Vermont public school students, as well as students attending private schools with public money. 

Now, with the latest infusion of funds drying up, advocates are urging lawmakers to fund school meals indefinitely. 

“The pandemic has been a horrible, horrible thing in so many ways,” Anore Horton, executive director of the nonprofit Hunger Free Vermont, said in an interview. “And the discovery that it’s possible and desirable to do universal school meals is one silver lining.”

Hunger Free Vermont has been pushing lawmakers to provide free meals to schoolchildren since before the Covid-19 pandemic struck the state. 

The nonprofit’s efforts are bolstered by a deep-pocketed donor: Solving Hunger, an initiative of venture capitalist and philanthropist Bradley Tusk, is helping fund Hunger Free Vermont’s 2023 campaign for a permanent program, as well as programs in other states.  

The benefits, advocates argue, are immense. For food-insecure families — many of whom are ineligible for federally funded meal benefits — school meals can become a financial lifesaver and cornerstone of children’s diets.

Horton pointed to research showing that free meals improve students’ health, academic performance, and behavior in schools. They also provide an economic benefit to local communities and farms. And, she said, making meals free for all — not just low-income students — removes the stigma around buying lunch or breakfast. 

“So there’s pretty dramatic benefits in terms of better student learning, better student health, better student attendance, and overall better campus climate,” she said in an interview.

In March 2020, as the coronavirus shut down swaths of the U.S. economy, Congress passed a sweeping relief bill intended to blunt the economic impact of the virus. 

That bill paid for free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren across the country. In 2021, federal officials announced that the program would be renewed for a second year.  

But in the spring of 2022, as those federal funds were scheduled to dry up, state lawmakers tapped an “unprecedented” surplus in the state education fund to pay for the Universal School Meals Act, a $29 million, one-year extension of the free meal program.

In legislation codifying that program, lawmakers noted that it was their intent “to identify the amount of and sources of potential long-term funding for universal school meals in Vermont.”  

Between October 2019 and October 2022, participation in Vermont’s school meal programs has risen about 10%, according to state data. 

Initially, the state’s Joint Fiscal Office estimated that a universal school meals program could cost between $24 million and $40 million a year. 

In a report Jan. 16, however, the Vermont Agency of Education estimated that actual costs would likely be on the lower end of those estimates. Officials said they expected the program to cost about $27 million this year — though they cautioned that those figures could change by the time school lets out.

But that report, and Horton, pointed to a handful of recent or upcoming federal policy changes around school meals, including increased reimbursement rates, better eligibility data, and expanding the number of schools able to participate in a targeted program for low-income areas.

Those changes, Horton said, would make a potential Vermont program cheaper and easier to implement. Now, she and other advocates have been making their pitch to a series of legislative committees — and to hungry cafeteria visitors. 

The question, though, is where money for such a program could come from. Last year, lawmakers commissioned a report from the state’s Joint Fiscal Office “examining possible revenue sources” for a permanent universal meals program. 

Those potential sources include expanding the state’s sales tax base, a tax on sugary beverages, and “other sources of revenue not ordinarily used for General Fund purposes,” according to statute. That report is due Feb. 1. 

Asked about their positions on a permanent meal program, legislative leaders have preached caution around spending, noting that federal pandemic dollars are drying up. 

“We are thankful that Vermont emerged as a leader nationally on food security throughout the pandemic, in part as a result of extending the previously federally-funded school meals program using a surplus in the state education fund,” Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, said in an emailed statement. “We will be doing our due diligence this session to carefully consider all needs, recognizing that we don’t have the influx of federal funds that enabled this pilot program this past year.”

House Speaker Rep. Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said in a statement that she is “looking forward to investigating and discussing long-term solutions to all of our food programs.” 

“While we will not have the same access to federal funds, I look forward to working with Vermont students, our community partners, and others to find a sustainable path for Universal School Meals,” Krowinski said.

Jason Maulucci, a spokesperson for Gov. Phil Scott, said Scott “has said he is open to having the conversation, and supports efforts to ensure all students who need school meal assistance get it.” 

But last year, Scott took a hard stance against tax increases — and in Maulucci’s statement, he reemphasized that position.  

“However, he has also been clear that he will not support regressive tax increases that disproportionately harm those who can least afford it as a way to pay for students who come from families with greater means to get free meals,” he said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: School meal funding is set to expire this year. Will Vermont lawmakers go back for another helping?.

On Dec. 23, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that funds the federal government through fiscal year 2023 and contains crucial investments in hunger prevention. 

Continued federal support to address hunger is critical as lower-income families, and those living on fixed incomes, face the winter months with skyrocketing heating, transportation and food costs. 

While we celebrate much of what Congress accomplished in the omnibus package, Hunger Free Vermont is joined by the Community of Vermont Elders, the Vermont Association of Area Agencies on Aging, Vermont Community Action Partnership, and Vermont Kin As Parents in unequivocally opposing the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, known as 3SquaresVT in Vermont) that are included in the package.

Since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, many Vermonters have relied on 3SquaresVT and the temporary boost in benefits through emergency allotments, averaging $82 per person per month. More than 70,000 people in our state receive 3SquaresVT and rely on these increased benefits to buy food. 

In 2021, one in three Vermonters experienced hunger; today, two in five Vermonters currently experience food insecurity, which is nearly a 10% increase in the impact of hunger on our families, friends and neighbors since just last year. 

One-person families, which include many older Vermonters, stand to lose up to $260 per month, or 90% of the monthly benefits households have received and relied on for nearly three years. 

The 2023 omnibus bill has eliminated these allotments months earlier than expected, and redirected SNAP funds to establish a multiyear, and hopefully permanent, Summer EBT program for students who receive free or reduced-price cost meals during the school year. This new Summer EBT program will provide $40 per school-age child (less than half of the average emergency allotment per person) in electronic benefits that families can use to buy food at local grocery stores and farmers markets each month of the summer when school meals are not available. 

This is a much-needed initiative and we have long called for the creation of a permanent, federally funded Summer EBT program, particularly important in rural states like Vermont, where it is so difficult to establish and sustain congregate summer meal sites in many of our small towns. 

Ending SNAP Emergency Allotments after February while hunger is at its worst is an unacceptable price that Vermonters living with low incomes must now pay. Families do not have adequate time to prepare for this unexpected cut in benefits and thousands of Vermonters are going to receive considerably less food assistance in 2023, even with Summer EBT payments for families with school-age children. 

Our charitable and emergency food networks, already facing significantly increased need with limited funding, will not be able to fill the gap.

All Vermont families are different, yet we are unified by a fundamental need: food to thrive, to nourish ourselves and our loved ones. For many of us, including more than 9,500 known children being raised by “kin parents,” family is multigenerational, with grandparents caring for grandchildren, aunts and uncles caring for nieces and nephews, sisters and brothers caring for their siblings. 

Cutting SNAP benefits, a nutrition program that serves many different kinds of families, to pay for a child nutrition program is a no-win pattern that we see all too often from Congress. In many cases, families helped by improvements in child nutrition programs are the very same ones harmed by the reduction of their SNAP benefits. 

Taking money from one nutrition program to pay for another does not alleviate the struggle that families and individuals are experiencing. Going into the coldest months of the year in Vermont, with record-high food and heating costs, now is not the time to be sunsetting critical emergency benefits. 

Pitting vital anti-hunger programs against each other will only increase hunger in every corner of our state. In 2023, Congress has the opportunity to use the Farm Bill reauthorization process to permanently increase SNAP benefits and ease the eligibility rules so that everyone facing hunger and food insecurity — from retirees to college students to young workers to single parents — can be healthy and thrive. 

We urge Vermonters to join us in the 2023 Farm Bill Coalition to advocate for improving and strengthening the nutrition programs that many Vermonters depend on. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Anore Horton: Omnibus bill puts families in jeopardy with early end to food benefits.

Sept. 28 marked the first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health in more than 50 years. Elected officials, people who have experienced hunger, advocates, nonprofits and private-sector leaders came together to discuss solutions to the ongoing injustice of hunger. 

Far too many in our country know the experience of not having enough food, including many neighbors here in Vermont. Important advancements came from the first conference of this kind, held in 1969, including changes in food and nutrition policy, major expansions of what is now called SNAP/3SquaresVT and School Lunch Program, and the creation of the supplemental feeding program for Women Infants and Children. 

These changes made significant headway in eliminating hunger but, by the 1980s, policy changes and program cuts caused a resurgence in hunger nationwide. 

The goals and recommendations coming from the 2022 conference offer a new chance to make positive, impactful changes for decades to come — but only if we seize this moment for bold action and solutions centered in equity and justice. 

Here in Vermont, more people have experienced hunger this past year than at any other point during the Covid-19 pandemic. Recent data collected by the UVM-led National Food Access and Covid Research Team found that two out of every five people in our state have experienced hunger in the past year. This means thousands across the state are struggling to consistently afford the nourishing foods they need and want. 

As we face the ongoing impacts of the pandemic and inflation, we applaud the timely focus of the White House on hunger and its root causes and we acknowledge the opportunities this renewed focus offers here in Vermont. Holding the conference is a welcome first step, and we call on the White House to be accountable, and to work with Congress to make the investments and implement the solutions outlined in the National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition and Health. 

Many of the ideas the White House has proposed are tried and tested, and, if implemented, will help to end hunger. We know strategies that work, like permanently expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit and increasing the minimum wage. 

The Expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021 kept 5.3 million people above the poverty line and drove child poverty to the lowest level since 1967. Then it ended. 

The White House has proposed cost-effective investments in nutrition programs that we know will reduce hunger. These include expanding Summer EBT to ensure families with kids can afford groceries when school is out, support for Meals on Wheels, and expanding access to 3SquaresVT so that more people can use the program, including college students and formerly incarcerated individuals. 

But the White House proposal alone is not enough. We can — and should — do more. The White House strategy aims to decrease the number of households going without food, and to cut the number of households struggling to afford enough food, in half. In Vermont, that would mean one in five of us would still be facing hunger. 

We have a vision for ending hunger that doesn’t leave behind half of neighbors experiencing hunger. The federal government must act to ensure that federal nutrition programs like SNAP, school meals, and Meals on Wheels can meet the needs of people facing hunger. 

● We need a national, permanent universal school meals program. 

● We need SNAP benefits to cover the true cost of nutritious food. 

● We need investments to help organizations like the Vermont Foodbank meet the unprecedented demand that food shelves and pantries are facing across the state.

● We need to address the root causes of hunger, not just a system that lifts some individuals out of poverty temporarily, and excludes others.

● We need systems that allow everyone to have access to nourishing, dignified food. 

● We need to address race-based inequities in access to food, and to ensure our systems don’t require families to make impossible choices in meeting basic needs. 

Let’s not let this historic moment go to waste, or the national strategy to gather dust. We are ready, and we are committed to doing the work alongside the federal government, state government, and our partners in the public and private sectors. Together we can end hunger.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Horton & Sayles: White House Conference on Hunger offers a moment to build on.

Gov. Phil Scott signed bills Tuesday that will create a one-year pilot program of free breakfast and lunch for Vermont students and ban offensive school mascots.

The governor’s signatures represent victories for anti-hunger advocates and for activists who have pushed to retire mascots that stereotype marginalized communities, most visibly Indigenous people.  

During the pandemic, federal dollars paid for free school meals for students. But legislation extending that program has stalled in the U.S. Senate, and money is expected to run out before the upcoming school year. 

Backed by the nonprofit Hunger Free Vermont, legislators proposed using surplus education fund money to extend the program through the next school year. Lawmakers approved S.100, a plan to create a $29 million, one-year program to provide free breakfast and lunch to Vermont students who attend public school, or independent schools with public tuition money. 

Scott initially appeared unenthusiastic about the plan, suggesting that funding a one-year pilot might lead to future tax hikes.

“Creating a new universal program with one-time money could, as the Legislature has discussed, lead to regressive tax increases that in part pay for meals for children from affluent families who do not need the financial help,” Scott spokesperson Jason Maulucci said in late April. 

But on Tuesday, Scott signed the bill anyway.  

“As the Governor has said, he supports the state doing more to help vulnerable families in need — but he will not support forcing working families to pay more in taxes to essentially pay for the more affluent to get free meals,” Maulucci said Tuesday in an email. “But, that will be a debate for next year if the Legislature chooses to pursue that path.”

Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, said the organization was “thrilled” at the news of the governor’s decision. 

“We’re confident that universal school meals is going to prove its value in the coming year, and that the Legislature will make it a permanent program,” Horton said.

Scott also signed S.139, which will require the Vermont Agency of Education to create a “nondiscriminatory school branding policy.” 

That policy will prohibit schools from having mascots or other identifying materials based on “the race, creed, color, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity of any person or group of persons,” or any person or group “associated with the repression of others.”

That bill was introduced just days after the Rutland School Board voted to reinstate the high school’s controversial Native American-themed mascot, the Raiders. 

Lawmakers approved the proposal by a comfortable margin, but not before it sparked a debate about local control. Opponents argued that the bill would undermine school districts’ ability to make their own decisions and policies.

“Every year, more and more control is taken by this building, and by this town, and by officials in our government in Montpelier,” outgoing Rep. Heidi Scheuermann, R-Stowe, said of the bill during a floor debate earlier this month. 

But the bill’s supporters, including Indigenous Vermonters, argued that offensive mascots inflict psychological harm on students, especially those who belong to the communities being stereotyped. 

“When we as a society marginalize and shape human beings into caricatures, we are complicit in the violence against them, metaphorically and literally,” Melody Walker Brook, a citizen of the Elnu Abenaki, told lawmakers in submitted testimony in February. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Phil Scott signs bills on free school meals, offensive school mascots.

Late last year, state officials announced good news for Vermont’s education fund. 

Buoyed by strong tax revenues, the fund — which pays for the state’s public school budgets — is enjoying a surplus of nearly $100 million.

Now, as the legislature wonders what to do with that extra cash, lawmakers may be forced to choose from several different proposals: Free breakfast and lunch for students? Remediating toxic chemicals? Tax rebates?

“It’s a choice that nobody who works in the field of education would want to make,” said Jeff Francis, executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association. 

For the past two years, federal pandemic aid has footed the bill for breakfast and lunch for Vermont’s public school students. But with that money expected to expire at the end of the school year, anti-hunger advocates are urging state lawmakers to pay for it. 

The nonprofit Hunger Free Vermont has thrown its weight behind S.100, a Senate bill that would allocate $29 million from the education fund surplus toward a one-year pilot program of breakfast and lunch for Vermont kids. 

The bill as written also would cover children who attend independent schools with public tuition money. 

Advocates argue that paying for all children’s meals improves kids’ physical and mental health and leads to better academic outcomes. And funding meals for everyone, they say, eliminates stigma and covers low-income students whose families may not meet federal income limits.

“It’s a school meals bill, it’s a support-our-farmers bill, it’s a mental health bill, it’s an improve-learning-and-focus bill,” Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, said at a rally in support of the bill on the Statehouse steps last week. “It’s a universal bill for good.”

Lawmakers passed that bill out of the House of Representatives on Wednesday. But some have proposed different uses for the surplus money.

Gov. Phil Scott has called for lawmakers to put half the surplus toward career and technical education and send the other half back to taxpayers. In an email Wednesday, Jason Maulucci, a spokesperson for Scott, said the governor still favors that plan. 

“Regarding the Legislature’s other priorities with this money, the Governor has said he supports helping those in need receive free school meals at school,” Maulucci said. “However, creating a new universal program with one-time money could, as the legislature has discussed, lead to regressive tax increases that in part pay for meals for children from affluent families who do not need the financial help.”

Others have called on lawmakers to use the money to clean up polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, in school buildings. 

The substances, which are believed to cause a range of health problems, including cancer, were used widely in building materials until they were banned around 1980. 

In 2020, school administrators discovered the chemicals in Burlington High School, forcing students to abandon the school for a retrofitted department store. The district hopes to build a new high school at a cost of roughly $230 million. 

Next month, state officials plan to launch a program to test more than 300 Vermont schools for the chemicals. But that initiative is causing concern for many districts, which fear the potential costs if the chemicals are found in their schools. 

School officials have called on the Legislature to set aside money for remediating school buildings if PCBs are detected — from the education fund, if necessary. 

That PCB remediation money is “the highest priority,” said Francis, of the superintendents association.

“My hope is that the General Assembly sees fit to put money into PCB remediation,” he said. “And as part of their process, if they provide money for universal school meals as well, that’s great.”

Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, chair of the Senate Education Committee, has also expressed skepticism about using the education fund surplus for universal meals. 

[See the latest status on key pieces of legislation using VTDigger’s 2022 Bill Tracker.]

“Right now, I don’t think it makes sense to use one-time monies without a plan going forward,” Campion said. “But I’m going to listen when the bill comes into a committee. I want to pull apart why the House decided to do what they decided to do.”

As most of Vermont’s schools have not been tested, it’s still unclear how much money would be needed for PCB remediation. But estimates put that figure at around $40 million. 

Other states plagued by PCB contamination have found another source of cleanup funds: litigation. 

Over the past few years, Bayer, the parent company of longtime PCB manufacturer Monsanto, has paid out tens of millions of dollars in settlements to U.S. states over PCB contamination. Earlier this year, New Hampshire received a $25 million settlement over PCBs in waterways. 

Asked about the possibility of litigation over PCBs in Vermont, Charity Clark, the chief of staff in the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, said the agency “is aware of this issue and is looking into it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the committee that Sen. Brian Campion chairs.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Universal school meals. PCB remediation. Tech education. Can a $95 million surplus pay for it all?.

The holidays have begun, and while the debate over the Build Back Better pie continues, we need to remember that there are kids all over the country who will get no pie at all this holiday season. 

Amid the twists and turns, tight margins, and delayed votes on Capitol Hill making headlines, one thing remains true: American families need for things to get better. And on the simplest level, that looks like helping families meet their basic needs, including making sure their children don’t go hungry.

In Vermont, food insecurity increased by one-third during the pandemic. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy and Rep. Peter Welch know that’s a problem. It’s why they sponsored and cosponsored Senate and House bills, respectively, to make universal school meals permanent nationwide. 

After seeing the impact universal free school breakfast and lunch (extended by the USDA as part of pandemic emergency food assistance measures) is having to help Vermont families, they understand that universal school meals is a common-sense policy.

That’s not the first time Vermont has led on the issue of child hunger. Along with many other partners, we worked to move a bill through the state Senate that would make Vermont the first in the nation to provide free breakfast to all public school students. On the docket for the next state legislative session: See a bill for permanent universal school meals over the finish line. If passed, it would go a long way to ending hunger for the more than 40,000 low-income children in Vermont’s schools. How it’s funded depends on negotiations happening right now on the Hill. 

Significant funding to expand the community eligibility provision is on the line. If kept in the Build Back Better bill, the funding would make school meals available to every child who needs one. In Vermont, the cost to feed all kids in school would be cut in half, and maybe more. The child nutrition provisions in Build Back Better would also help families cover the extra costs of food for their kids all summer long.

We are counting on Vermont’s congressional delegation to hold the line, keep leading, and keep child hunger and the possibility of ending it front and center in Washington. That means not just keeping the community eligibility provision intact, but also holding firm on meaningful funding that makes a difference. 

To the public, it seems lawmakers right now are focused on the fights. But ending child hunger is popular in rural areas, suburban areas, and urban areas. It can be a bipartisan win that makes a profound difference in the daily lives of families across Vermont and across the country.

Importantly, we know it works. We’ve already been feeding all kids in K-12 public schools due to pandemic measures. We’ve seen how efficient it is because it gets food straight into children’s mouths without questions asked, stigma, application forms or poverty tests. 

Studies have shown that students with greater food security have higher retention and better attendance, graduation rates and academic performance. Future college graduates are much more likely to be employed and make economic contributions to their local communities. 

Take New York City, which has adopted a citywide universal school meals policy: Test scores are rising, stigma is decreasing, and there’s overall a better environment for students as a result.

When Congress passes something, whatever that may be — keep the community eligibility provision in there, robustly fund it, and make it meaningful because ending child hunger is a straightforward, critical win. It’s the win American families need right now. Everyone can agree.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Horton & Tusk: House has passed Build Back Better, but don’t let up on child hunger.

At a news conference Wednesday highlighting school nutrition expansions in Democrats’ proposed domestic budget, Vermont’s U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders urged his colleagues to vote ”yes” on the budget quickly, saying “the stakes are enormous.”

Sanders was joined by U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., and other stakeholders in St. Johnsbury to tout provisions in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan that would — among many other things — expand nutritional assistance to schools, enabling more children to receive free and reduced-price meals.

Those provisions are important, Sanders said, though they’re “a very small part of this overall bill.” The multitrillion-dollar package also includes proposals to address climate change, establish universal and free pre-kindergarten, continue child tax credits via direct payments to families, invest in affordable housing and more.

“What we are trying to do is address the needs that working people are facing in America that have been neglected for decades,” Sanders said. “So this is a complicated bill.”

Sanders plays a key role in negotiations as chair of the Senate Budget Committee. He’s made headlines sparring with moderate U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Arizona, who have been pushing to scale back the proposed social programs to keep the price tag down.

With a razor-thin 50-50 majority in the Senate, Sanders needs every single Democrat in the Senate to vote “yes.” In the House, the margin of error isn’t much larger.

“That means that any one member can say, ‘Well, you know what, I don’t like that provision,’ and you’ve got to go back to the drawing board,” he said. “So this has been an enormously difficult process but … the stakes are enormous and we cannot fail.”

Should the budget pass with current proposals to expand nutrition assistance programs, every school in Vermont could provide free meals to all of its students, Sanders and Welch said. And with universal eligibility, they said children may feel more comfortable taking their free meals.

For many children who rely on school for meals, a school closure or mandatory quarantine due to Covid means they won’t eat a healthy meal, if any at all.

Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, said the provisions present a “transformational opportunity” to address childhood and family hunger.

“There’s no going back to some normal before this pandemic when it comes to schools and school meals,” she said. “There will only be taking food away from kids who are getting it now and we must not let that happen and we don’t have to let that happen.”

The news conference came less than a week after Welch and 227 of his House colleagues passed a $1 trillion nationwide infrastructure package, from which Vermont is set to receive $2.2 billion for roads, bridges, water systems, broadband and more. 

The package, which is on its way to the president’s desk for his signature, is one of two hallmark pieces of legislation championed by Biden’s White House, the second being the Build Back Better budget.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Sanders, Welch urge yes vote on Build Back Better, citing school nutrition expansions.

The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

The state of emergency gave the Scott administration the authority to maintain a vast social safety net during the pandemic. Landlords were barred from evicting renters, homeless Vermonters were housed free of charge in motels around the state, and a series of meal distribution programs ensured families access to food. 

Now that the emergency declaration has ended, advocates are nervous that the boost in social services over the past 15 months will be coming to an end too.

Pandemic aid programs showed that the state could feed and house every person in need, said Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. Horton’s organization and more than 130 others sent a letter to the Scott administration last week urging the state to seek more permanent solutions to the housing and hunger crises.

“What we’re saying in part with this letter is that it’s not acceptable to go back to what was accepted as normal pre-pandemic, where we had a significant number of people in our state who didn’t have food and didn’t have shelter on any given day,” Horton said. “We want to transform that situation and never go back.”

On this week’s podcast, Horton discusses the path to making pandemic social services permanent. Plus, VTDigger’s Xander Landen details the effects of lifting the emergency declaration. Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.

Xander Landen: The state of emergency that we’ve now had in place for 15 months, since March of 2020, has basically been the vehicle that the governor has used to either ratchet up or wind down the pandemic restrictions that we’ve all been living with for the last year. 

The state of emergency is really what allowed the governor to unilaterally shut down the economy, require that people wear masks in public, limit where people can travel and under what circumstances they can travel. All of these things, in normal times, a governor would not be able to order unilaterally. This emergency declaration gives executives — governors — extraordinary power in times of great need. And now that we’re winding down the pandemic, the governor is seeing that it’s time to give up the authority that he’s been able to wield for the last year.

What happens on the day that the state of emergency actually ends? What actually changes?

Xander Landen: The big thing that the governor and the administration have to do is think about, what aspects of the state’s Covid-19 emergency response have to continue? And how does the state ensure that they can continue, even though you don’t have this emergency declaration in place? 

What has come up in recent days is a concern about, how is the state going to be able to maintain heightened aid programs that it’s been carrying out during the pandemic without an emergency declaration? Because that emergency declaration has allowed Vermont to receive a lot of federal funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That has allowed the state to distribute more food to those in need, and has allowed the state to receive reimbursement from the feds for housing programs for the homeless population, which has almost entirely been housed by the state since March of 2020 in motels, hotels, shelters. That’s cost a lot of money. 

There’s concern that if you drop this emergency state of emergency, we’re going to lose access to resources that we need to respond to continuing needs.

How does the administration plan to handle that?

Xander Landen: This is not a surprise to the administration. They’re also concerned about this. And this is sort of a technical question that they have to answer: How can we ensure that we’re still getting support from the federal government for those programs, even if the state of emergency is lifted?

Their solution at this point is an executive order. The governor can issue executive orders at any time to carry out initiatives. And what this executive order will be is an executive order that basically continues the state’s emergency housing and food distribution programs, for the purpose of being able to receive funding from FEMA. Because FEMA has told the Scott administration, you can continue to receive this federal funding, so long as there’s a governor’s order that sort of lays down the necessity for these programs to continue. 

I talked to the governor’s legal counsel, Jaye Pershing Johnson, the other day, and I was asking her about, basically, what’s the administration going to do if we get rid of the state of emergency, and there’s all of a sudden a resurgence in cases? What happens? What can the governor do? 

And she did say, the governor can always just issue another emergency declaration and put us back in a situation where the governor can do what he’s done before. However, she was pretty confident that even if there is a resurgence in cases, the government’s response is not going to look like what it was in March of 2020, or even a few months ago — because people are vaccinated, which gives them immunity. And because the state and the public know how this virus works, and they know how to respond.

She said that they’d expect that any public health response would be much more minimal, and more targeted, than what we saw before, which is basically broad-stroke, blanket restrictions.

Does it make sense to look at the end of the state of emergency as kind of symbolic of the end of this period where the state has really made Covid-19 the focus of its operations? Is that reading too much into it?

Xander Landen: I don’t think that is reading too much into it. I think that you’re correct, that this is very momentous. It shows that the state government has a great deal of confidence that cases are not going to spike again, at least for now — that business and daily life can go on as usual, to some extent, without any restriction. That is a giant change. 

And I think it’s also evidenced in the fact that, at least the press, our lives were dominated by the governor’s biweekly press conferences, where officials would get up and talk about the latest modeling of the pandemic and the latest case information, etc. The governor is now winding those down, and we’re going to be hearing a lot less about Covid. That, to me, is also a big sign that things are changing. And hopefully they’ll stay that way.

We’ve been aware for a few weeks now that the end of the state of emergency was on the way. So last week, a group of about 130 organizations sent a letter to the Scott administration, urging them to find permanent solutions to some of the needs that the pandemic exposed.

Anore Horton: People have relied on these programs for over a year, and now they’re coming to an end. And what are we going to do then as a state?

Anore Horton heads one of the organizations behind that letter: Hunger Free Vermont. She said it’s going to be critical for the state to find ways to slowly ramp down the pandemic hunger and housing relief programs.

Anore Horton: I think that that’s really important, because we need some time to figure out, as a state, how we’re going to continue to serve the people who are really continuing to need these programs.

The hotel housing program, for people who don’t have any other place to live — that’s another critical program that’s quite expensive, but has made a profound, profound difference — a life and death difference, literally — during this last year-plus for people in our state. That’s another program that is FEMA-funded, and it is ending in its current form July 1. And while some categories of particularly vulnerable people will be able to continue to be housed in hotels, there’s a significant number of individuals who are going to not be able to stay in the hotels any longer. 

The challenge there is that there simply do not exist sufficient units of housing in the state to house those folks in another way. Right now, there’s really no stable place with four walls and a roof for some of these folks to go. And what’s also going to end for them is meals that were being paid for also through this FEMA funding and delivered to the hotels by a range of local charitable and social service organizations. So we’ve got a housing/shelter crisis and a hunger crisis looming.

I thought it was really interesting the way you and the other authors of this letter phrased this by saying that “most people in the state are still living in a state of emergency.” We’re talking about this in the technical, sort of legalistic sense, but you’re talking about something much different and more abstract there.

Yes. There’s a couple of points here. One is that we have had people living in a state of emergency in Vermont before the pandemic, and during the pandemic — and still now, because we’ve had a really unacceptably high number of people who really did not have access to some of the absolutely critical basic needs that human beings have to have to survive: shelter and food. 

What we saw during the pandemic that’s really extraordinary, and that I really hope that every single one of us holds on to, is that we actually were able to house everyone who needed housing, and get food to pretty much everyone who needed food. And that means that it’s possible for us to do that as a society, as a state. What we’re saying in part with this letter is that it’s not acceptable to go back to what was accepted as normal pre-pandemic, where we had a significant number of people in our state who didn’t have food and didn’t have shelter on any given day. We want to transform that situation and never go back.

Some of what you’ve said about certain specific programs is that some kind of extension, or way to continue to fund these and ramp them down slowly, would be an improvement from just ending them abruptly. But it seems like the point that you’re getting at here is something even broader — that regardless of some of these technical designations, you’re really looking for more long-term, more permanent solutions to some of these problems. What do those look like? How do we take what we learned during the pandemic and actually apply it to what we see going forward?

I think that some answers are easier than others. If you look at housing, I think that our state is trying to move in the right direction. The Scott administration and legislators have appropriated a significant amount of money. There will be new housing units built, new affordable housing units built, in our state. And we need more of that. We’ll need to commit more funding and get additionally creative about how we’re going to really house everyone who needs to be housed. But that’s possible to do.

For populations — especially, this is easy to think about when it comes to children and young people in our state, who spend a considerable amount of their time in childcare and in school — how we end hunger for those populations, the solution is actually easy to understand. In school, it’s easy to implement; in childcare, it’s a little more challenging — but that is to provide universal meals that go along with the universal education that we all understand is really important for our children to receive. That’s kind of the lower hanging fruit, I think, when it comes to how we make sure that everyone has enough food to eat. 

And then I think there’s a lot of creativity available to us as Vermonters that we need to apply toward how we’re going to reach everyone in our state who isn’t making enough money to be able to make their own choices about feeding and housing themselves. Fundamentally, actually, the answer to all of this is quite simple, and that is that we need to pay people livable wages that cover the costs of their basic needs. That Vermonters work hard, and we all deserve to be able to earn what we need to take care of our basic needs for ourselves and our families. So ultimately, this is an economic problem. And it’s possible for us to solve it, but we just all collectively need the will to do that.

Given how much we understand of the role of federal aid funding over the past year, it really does seem like funding is really the key issue here. Things like universal school meals, the way we saw that move through the Legislature this year — the price tag really became sort of the sticking point. I wonder, looking to a day when we don’t have these influxes of federal cash coming in, how do we deal with the price tag? How do we deal with the sticker shock when we tally up how much these things will cost?

Well, first of all, there’s advocacy to do at the federal level. So I think that it’s really possible for us to continue to work on having the programs at the federal level redesigned in ways that make it easier for Vermont to use those programs and maximize their benefit for Vermonters. 

But I think the sticker shock question is really an interesting one. And it’s a matter of perspective. So from our perspective at Hunger Free Vermont, if you really stop and think about how much money we spend on public education in our state, for the next generation, that’s really important. And it’s worth a lot to all of us in Vermont to have an educated workforce, and to have all of our young people have what they need to grow and thrive and develop and come up with the next generation of creative solutions for our state. And the overall price tag for that is quite significant.

The cost of providing nutritious, healthy local, farm fresh school breakfast and lunch for every student in our state is actually a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket of that. And I think that if there was an educational reform that had been proven over and over and over again to improve student math and reading test scores, reduce obesity, reduce number of pediatric days in the hospital, improve focus, reduce bullying, reduce absenteeism and tardiness at school, and improve overall student health and reduce, dramatically, visits to the school nurse — doesn’t that sound like, for $24 million a year for the entire state of Vermont, that is actually incredibly cheap? That’s amazingly cheap. All of those benefits have been proven when schools provide universal meals. 

So to my mind, I think that actually, the real sticker shock for Vermonters, the real steep price tag, is in not doing these interventions that we know make a dramatic difference, and are going to really actually make our population much healthier and better educated into the future.

One thing that struck me reading what was in this letter was how much it reminded me of a lot of the things that were really at the forefront for people a year and a half ago, last March or April, when things like hunger and housing were really at the forefront in images that we were seeing and things that we were hearing about the pandemic response. And it seems that those things sort of faded from view as the pandemic wore on, yet from what you’ve described, the need didn’t really change all that much. How do you explain that discrepancy?

I’m not sure I totally agree with you, that these issues faded from view, I think that many organizations and individuals in Vermont did continue to pay attention to these issues. But I do think that now, the impulse is to celebrate our ability to come out and be in public together. Part of the reason why we published this letter is that there’s a real danger that we think that the crises exposed by the pandemic have somehow been handled. But they were crises before the pandemic.

The long lines of cars that we saw early on in the pandemic, those were people who were hungry before the pandemic hit and needed those resources before the pandemic, and suddenly were able to access them. And the fact that those lines of cars blocking streets have disappeared does not mean that people are no longer coming to pick up boxes of food. People are still doing that. It’s just that the Vermont Food Bank and all of their partners who’ve been running those food box programs all this time are logistical wizards, have found all kinds of ways to make that process quicker and easier and more dignified for people. They’ve been running that program this whole time. And the fact that the cars aren’t backed up is a testament to their neverending hard work on behalf of everyone in our state during this really challenging time. 

But the food boxes are still getting packed, and they’re still being picked up. And many other programs are also still being used every day here in our state. And it’s really important for everyone to understand and remember that.

Read the story on VTDigger here: The Deeper Dig: Ending the Covid emergency.

For years, anti-hunger advocates have been calling on all public schools to offer free meals to every student, no questions asked. And, overnight, a once-unthinkable policy goal became a reality across the country, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture supplied the money, allowing schools to keep kids fed through the pandemic.

The federal government has committed to picking up that tab at least through the summer by extending its reimbursement waivers. But those waivers are expected to expire eventually, and some Vermont lawmakers — including the Senate’s leadership — want the state to make that reform permanent. 

S.100 would require all Vermont public schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to every student, regardless of income. And it would offer incentives for school meal programs to buy food locally.

“A silver lining of this really terrible year has been that we have had forced upon us an experiment in what happens when we get to provide universal meals to all kids everywhere in Vermont, at no charge to their individual families,” said Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. “And what has happened has been really extraordinary.”

It is hard to predict how much universal free meals would cost the state once federal waivers expire because the price would vary, depending on student participation rates, and how many qualify for federally subsidized meals in a given year. But it won’t be cheap.

The Agency of Education estimates the measure could cost as much as $50 million a year, although Education Secretary Dan French has acknowledged that would be a very worst-case scenario. 

Advocates peg the cost closer to $20 million to $25 million a year and say the agency’s estimates make completely unrealistic assumptions about participation. Legislative analysts say the cost could be as low as $24 million a year or as high as $40 million.

Groups representing the state’s superintendents, principals and school boards all say they strongly support the mandate — but not its funding mechanism. The bill requires schools to seek as much federal reimbursement as possible for free meal programs, but school districts will have to cover whatever is left over. 

French has called the bill’s aims “laudable,” but raised concerns about costs that schools would have to absorb. And he’s argued that Covid recovery work should be top of mind for his agency, which was stretched thin even before the pandemic came to Vermont.

“I question the complexity of this bill and what’s being asked of everyone to do. If there was nothing else going on, I would say, ‘Wow, this could be the flagship policy of our time,’ but unfortunately, we already have so much in-flight already, pre-Covid,” he told lawmakers Tuesday.

But advocates say the pandemic’s economic fallout will linger for years, and aggressive anti-hunger measures like these must be a keystone of recovery work.

“One out of four Vermonters expressing food insecurity — that doesn’t go away a month after the emergency order is lifted,” Sen. Chris Pearson, P/D-Chittenden, a sponsor of the legislation, told the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday. 

Senate Education members voted to recommend the bill on Friday, ahead of crossover, a legislative deadline that requires bills move along, lest they die in committee. But lawmakers on the education panel still plan to take more testimony next week, in part to explore alternate funding mechanisms they might recommend to their colleagues in the Legislature’s money committees, who will soon consider the bill.

Agency of Education officials have raised other objections. They worry that families won’t fill out their free-and-reduced-price lunch paperwork without the carrot of a subsidized meal. That could have untold downstream effects for schools that rely on free-and-reduced lunch data, a key proxy for wealth in their district, to qualify for countless federal and state aid programs.

But Horton notes that schools aren’t allowed, under federal rules, to require families to fill out free-and-reduced-price meal paperwork anyway, which means many already don’t. And there are alternative forms available from the federal government that districts could use, she said — forms that schools could even require families to fill out.

“This is a problem for the grownups in our state to figure out. It is not something that should keep us from making sure that every kid in Vermont can easily, freely and, without stigma, eat breakfast and lunch at school every day,” she said.

For decades, federal subsidies have reimbursed schools for free or reduced-price meals for income-eligible students. And even pre-Covid, certain very high-poverty schools used federal programs to offer universal meal programs. 

But advocates and many school officials have long argued that the eligibility criteria exclude many who are food-insecure and that stigma prevents many families who would qualify from signing up.

Despite her school’s hybrid remote and in-person schedule, Danielle Peveril, a math teacher at Lamoille Union Middle School in Hyde Park, said she’s noticed that student engagement has improved in some way this year. She credits the currently temporary universal meal program.

“It’s just made a huge difference. I think in their overall participation and just socially. Everybody’s got the same lunch, and it makes them feel like part of the group. It makes a more inclusive classroom,” she said.

At the very start of the year, Peveril said she noticed only a few kids raised their hands to order lunch at the beginning of the day. But as soon as the school made it clear that the program was “for everybody,” participation shot up. 

In the past, Peveril said she’s seen kids bullied for participating in the free-and-reduced-price lunch program. To avoid the stigma, many students just didn’t eat. 

“I’ve absolutely seen kids skip meals,” she said. “But not this year.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Legislature considers keeping school meals free for every student post-Covid.

When Peter Carmolli opened South Burlington’s first food shelf in November 2019, he wasn’t expecting a global pandemic to strike a few months later. Covid-19 completely upended his operations.

About half of Carmolli’s volunteer staff stepped down in March 2020 because they were in the at-risk age group for Covid-19. Meanwhile, the food shelf’s workload was growing — food insecurity was on the rise nationwide.

In Vermont, 70,580 people are currently struggling with hunger, according to Feeding America. Since the pandemic’s onset, nearly 30 percent of Vermonters have experienced food insecurity — almost triple 2018 levels — a study by the University of Vermont found.

“We were just figuring out what to do when the apocalypse hit. We are now relearning what to do,” Carmolli said. “The timing couldn’t have been better or worse, depending on your perspective.”

Initially, the charity’s board met to discuss whether to remain open. Gretchen Gundrum, a board member and South Burlington resident who has been using the food shelf’s services since 2019, strongly advocated continuing to serve the community.

Gundrum recognized from her own experiences as a single mother of two children with special needs that it would be more difficult to juggle child care and find gainful employment in the pandemic. She wanted to ensure that the food shelf would be open for neighbors dealing with similar concerns.

“Even when you’re facing a financial setback, you still have to eat,” Gundrum said. “What you see a lot is people having to choose: Do you pay your light bill or put food on the table?”

The board decided to keep the food shelf open, and about 30 separate households per week now use the service. Carmolli and his volunteer staff give out between 70 and 80 pounds of food and supplies to each household, totaling more than 2,000 pounds per week.

Since the food shelf opened its doors in 2019, Carmolli has missed work just two days.

Staff at Lamoille Community Food Share in Morrisville struggled, too, with increased need — visits were up by 59 percent last year, according to Susan Rousselle, the community engagement coordinator. Although numbers began to level off in January, it was still a record-breaking month for the food share.

“The greatest challenge is keeping up with demand,” Rousselle said.

Interrupted supply chains have made it more time-consuming to order food. The loss of volunteer support (many at Lamoille were also over age 65), meant more labor for the remaining workers.

Beyond the sheer amount of food and supplies that needed to be distributed, Carmolli suddenly had to navigate ever-changing safety guidelines to keep his staff, clients and himself Covid-free. Donations are left untouched for 24 hours before distribution, staff frequently wash and sanitize their hands, and volunteers prepack bags of food that Carmolli hands to clients outside while everyone wears masks and stays at least 6 feet apart.

Carmolli limits contact with clients for safety reasons, but he considers social interactions an essential part of the job.

“People need food, but sometimes they also need to talk,” he said. “So many people have no contacts. The mental health aspect is something you have to keep in mind along with the physical health.”

His greatest challenge? Not being able to give someone a big hug when it’s the No. 1 sense of connection they need.

Barriers to help

Another barrier that Carmolli has worked to overcome is the stigma of receiving food assistance. Many customers are embarrassed about using the food shelf, he said. There is a similar stigma associated with federal programs like 3SquaresVT, Vermont’s version of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

“The message [from leaders in the federal government] has been loud and clear that, if you seek out government assistance, there is something wrong with you. To me, this is outrageous,” said Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. “The causes of hunger are not moral, and they are not personal. They are purely economic and systemic.”

Horton also lamented the lack of effort put into promoting 3SquaresVT at the governor’s twice-weekly press conferences. Although charitable projects like Everyone Eats and food shelves are doing essential work, Horton thinks they have received a disproportionate amount of attention while federal programs have largely been ignored.

Food shelves have reported an increase in donations, and there is more collaboration across the state to help fill in gaps, according to Carmolli.

Community networks have also been expanded to include producers and farmers. For instance, Lamoille Community Food Share, based in Morrisville, began buying local products to make up for supply-chain disruptions at the national level and plans to continue these partnerships into the future.

“We’re all in this together,” Carmolli said.

To find out if you’re eligible for 3SquaresVT or to apply: https://vermontfoodhelp.com 
To find a food shelf in your area: https://www.vtfoodbank.org/agency-locator
To participate in Everyone Eats: https://vteveryoneeats.org/find-a-meal 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Virus in Vermont: Food shelves struggle to keep up as pandemic drags on.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Hunger is growing in Vermont. The rate of Vermonters experiencing food insecurity has gone from 1 in 10 before the pandemic to 1 in 4 today. Last summer, people waited hours in line for mass food distributions around the state, but those distributions are ending. A groundbreaking new program has just launched called Everyone Eats, in which Vermont restaurants are paid to provide food for Vermonters in need, achieving the twin goals of employing food workers and feeding Vermonters. However, this program will end in December unless Congress reauthorizes emergency funding.

John Sayles, CEO of Vermont Foodbank, Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, and Jean Hamilton, program coordinator for Everyone Eats, discuss the changing face of the hunger crisis and how it is being addressed.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Vermont’s growing hunger crisis.

When schools went virtual in the spring, food service directors leapt into action and, within days, redesigned their programs from top to bottom, packing buses with bagged breakfasts and lunches to deliver meals daily directly to hundreds of families.

This week, they’ll pivot all over again.

Students return to class on Tuesday, and while reopening plans run the gamut, the vast majority rely on a mix of in-person and remote learning. That means schools not only deliver meals to those physically in school, but also to the thousands learning from home on any given day. 

“Like with every other aspect of getting schools and child care up and running this fall, school meals are in flux,” said Anore Horton, executive director of the statewide nonprofit Hunger Free Vermont.

Even for kids learning in the building, it won’t be simple, since students cannot crowd into cafeterias to sit at long tables side-by-side with dozens of other kids to eat. As for the students logging in via Zoom, schools can no longer rely on buses to transport food to their doors. To pull that off, nutrition programs had deputized bus drivers, paraeducators, and other staff to prepare, package, and deliver meals. But bus drivers will once again be transporting kids, and instructional aides will be back in the classroom. 

In Burlington, preK-2 students onsite will have their meals delivered to their classrooms, where children will eat their food at their socially distanced desks, according to assistant food service director Heather Torrey. Older students will mostly pick up their food in the cafeteria (they will be released on a staggered schedule) and then eat back in class.

As for those attending school from home, Torrey said the district is mulling both bulk food distribution sites and some form of home delivery. But she admits freely the district is still figuring that out. “I imagine this evolving rapidly,” she said.

And Torrey, who is also the outgoing president of the School Nutrition Association of Vermont, said one concern looms over every food director in the state: supply chain shortages.

“So we have our plan — and we think our plan is awesome. But say, for example, our takeout containers get back-ordered,” she said.

In the Addison Northwest and Mount Abraham Union school districts, Kathy Alexander, who runs their joint food service program, jokes that she is, at this point, “numb to logistical problems.”

“In March, it was like getting hit by a truck and having to just regroup so fast and everything was coming at us. And now we’re a little bit like, that’s how we operate,” she said. “I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.”

Nevertheless, Alexander says she and her staff are thrilled they’ll get to see kids again. In the districts she serves, elementary-age children will grab their breakfasts as they enter the building and eat the meals in their homerooms; lunch will be carted directly into classrooms. In staggered cohorts, high school students will pick up pre-packaged meals from kiosks and return to class to eat.

For kids learning remotely, the district plans a once-weekly pickup for students and parents to pick up multiple days worth of food. But Alexander said it’s likely the schedule could change, and home delivery might happen for certain families.

“I think that school meal programs are going to be making adjustments in real time as schools reopen,” Horton said.

The financial and regulatory framework that school meal programs are operating under is also subject to change. Last Monday, anti-hunger advocates cheered when the USDA, under pressure from lawmakers, announced it would extend a series of waivers that let schools feed all kids for free using a variety of pandemic-era distribution methods.

As late as mid-August, the Trump administration was insisting it would not extend the waivers, and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue warned this week that they could still sunset before the year ends if funding runs out. 

Horton emphasized it was “very good news” that the USDA ultimately did reverse course. But she said the announcement’s late arrival and the fact that the waivers could end with little notice made it hard for schools to plan ahead. 

For her part, Alexander says she hopes the temporary waivers will serve as proof of concept for universal free meals, a policy long-sought by advocates and many education officials. But she admits she’s nervous about the federal government again changing its mind.

“It’s hard to even imagine what that email would look like. When it says: ‘We ran out of money.’ So I’m kind of not thinking about right now,” she said.

The surprise news also came with little technical guidance from the USDA, and schools now have a slew of unanswered questions about how the waivers interact with the complex bureaucracy surrounding the federal lunch program. In Burlington, for example, Torrey said she’s unsure if using the waivers will mean the district cannot apply for another program that would have guaranteed free meals to all kids for at least the next four years.

Read the story on VTDigger here: As they reopen, schools once again have to reinvent lunchtime.

The vast majority of Vermont school districts plan to keep offering food to students over the summer months, but they’ll likely deliver fewer meals. A key reason why meal programs successfully kept so many fed during the shutdown — delivery by school bus — will end for many schools.

Data collected by the Agency of Education suggests that bus delivery dramatically improved access to meals after in-person schooling ceased and non-essential businesses shut due to Covid-19 in March. Overall, the number of daily meals served to the state’s schoolchildren dropped by 4% in April compared to the same month in 2019, according to data provided by the agency.

VTDigger analyzed the 27 districts that reported their method of distribution. The nine districts that reported delivery as their only distribution method had an increase of 20% in meals served, while the 10 districts that only had grab-and-go meals saw a 41% decline. 

“The biggest problem is transportation and that is mostly always the biggest problem for summer meals in rural states like Vermont. So the problem is nothing new. What is new, of course, is that we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” said Anore Horton, the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont.

The House has passed a package that would send an additional $12 million to reimburse schools for transportation and other summer meal-related expenses. The Senate is also expected to greenlight the bill, which is funded with federal relief dollars. 

But for many districts, the money could come too late.

The federal government is requiring schools to have plans in place for their summer meal programs by June 30. Legal deadlines aside, it takes time to set up the logistics of a meal program, and most schools are already on summer break.

“Everyone’s really concerned that we’re going to have this funding, we’re going to have this opportunity to have the greatest reach of summer meals for children that we’ve ever seen in our state, and we’re not going to be able to really fulfill on the promise of that, because the window is going to close,” Horton said.

In the Mt. Abraham Union and Addison Northwest school districts, Kathy Alexander, who oversees their shared food service program, said the schools were delivering about 3,600 meals a day via school bus during the school year. But with their bus and staffing contracts coming to a close, with no guarantee of additional funding, the districts had to switch gears.

Over the summer, they’ll offer food at child care centers and at summer enrichment programs. The schools will also allow families to pick up several days worth of meals at twice-weekly pickup sites. Based on responses to a survey the district sent out, a handful of families will get home delivery, although Alexander said the districts are still looking for volunteers to staff that effort.

Even if additional funds come through, Alexander is emphatic it’s too late at this point to make big changes. A new bus contract alone would take days to negotiate.

It was a “mini miracle” that the food service program was able to pivot so quickly to delivering meals when schools first shuttered, she said, and one that relied on the basic infrastructure already being in place.

“I don’t even know how we did it, to be honest with you. But, you know, the fact that the buses were available and we had staff available — right there — wanting to work, was key,” she said.

Given the responses the districts received in their survey, Alexander thinks the schools will be able to meet the demand that’s out there, even though they’ll be preparing substantially fewer meals. 

She acknowledges that there’s a disconnect. Food insecurity has dramatically spiked in Vermont during the pandemic, and the meals on the bus program was wildly successful. It’s possible, she said, that participation for some was more about avoiding the grocery store in an effort to better quarantine, or keeping kids feeling connected to school.

She is advertising the district’s summer meal program as widely as possible.

“So many people availed themselves so this and our numbers are definitely cut in half,” she said.

In the Montpelier-Roxbury school district, superintendent Libby Bonesteel said the district is cutting back from offering meals at four pickup locations to just one.

“What we were doing wasn’t necessarily sustainable, primarily because our administrators were the ones who were doing the food service,” she said.

Montpelier hasn’t historically run a summer food program, so a single pickup site is still more than what the district offered last year over the summer months. Bonesteel said it’s possible one grab-and-go site might not be enough, although the schools haven’t yet heard that from families.

“But if we do, then we’ll — just as we’ve been doing this whole time – revamp and think of something different, what we can within our capacity,” she said.

Erin Petenko contributed reporting.

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Read the story on VTDigger here: Pandemic school meal services set to scale down over summer.

The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Images of miles-long lines of cars waiting hours to receive free food have become powerful symbols of the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. They also show a flawed response to a longstanding problem, hunger relief advocates say.

“We’re never going to meet the unmet need by throwing more and more food box distributions at it,” said Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont.

Recent food distribution events have seen the launch of a new federal program, called Farmers to Families, that aims to connect local producers to people in need. But at the first event earlier this month in Berlin, hundreds of people went home empty handed.

Horton said those federal resources could have been better put towards expanding existing food assistance programs. Mass distribution events are “an insane way to take care of one of people’s most basic human needs that we all have,” she said, “when we could have just put that money into the SNAP program and expanded who can access benefits.”

Advocates say that while the need right now is acute — food insecurity in Vermont has gone up 50% during the crisis, by one estimate — there’s a sizable number of Vermonters who were facing food insecurity before Covid-19.

The state is working to streamline hunger relief efforts, which are currently handled by a patchwork of nonprofit and government entities. But advocates are calling on state officials to move more aggressively to address the problem and fund solutions.

**Podcast transcript**

This week: tens of thousands of Vermonters have lined up to receive food assistance during the Covid-19 pandemic. But those on the front lines of hunger relief say that feeding the massive number of people in need is going to require more than just meal giveaways.

Last Friday, the Vermont Foodbank and the Vermont National Guard took over the state airport in Berlin to hand out food.

Guard members moved pallets of milk crates and produce boxes around the tarmac. Drivers pulled up with their trunks open, soldiers loaded them up with about 50 pounds of food apiece, and then sent them away.

This was the first distribution event where families received fresh food instead of the military-style meals ready to eat, or MREs. Jason Maring from the Vermont Foodbank said this was part of a new federal program to connect local producers and distributors with people in need.

Jason Maring: We transitioned from MREs to more of a nonperishable food box, which is provided by FEMA, and then the USDA has provided the fresh food boxes.

There were boxes of Cabot cheese, and vegetables from Black River Produce. But the most striking aspect of the event was the lines. About 2,000 cars showed up to the site. They lined two runways, doubling back multiple times, and then stretched for miles along the road leading to the entrance. People waited for hours.

Driver: I’ve been waiting for about an hour. I may just cut out of line.

The fresh food ran out midway through the event. And about four hours in, they closed the site. Hundreds of people went home empty handed. One of them was Rebecca Vickery.

Rebecca Vickery: Hi, this is Rebecca.

Hi Rebecca. My name is Elizabeth Gribkoff…

Our reporter Elizabeth Gribkoff caught up with her after the event.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: So Rebecca Vickery, she’s a mother who lives in Essex. She has six kids in her care, including two foster children. Rebecca has her own voiceover business. She also previously had worked as a worship director but was laid off — prior to the pandemic, but not too long ago.

My impression was that Rebecca, like a lot of other Vermonters, has a lot of different strategies that she’ll use to ensure that her family is adequately fed. Of course that includes going to the grocery store, but she was saying something that’s been challenging lately is that prices of food have started to go up in stores, especially on items like meat.

Things aren’t always available. And she was saying, typically I like to try to shop sales, but at this point it’s kind of like you have to take what you can get.

Rebecca Vickery: It’s harder to find some things like in the store that you would normally be able to find affordably. Costco for example, has limits on the amount of food that you can purchase. And right now, I have six children in my care. Two of them are foster children. And so we’re in a family of eight, and you tell us that we can buy the same amount of food as a family of two? It doesn’t make sense.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: So she’s been supplementing that with going to different food pantry things.

Rebecca Vickery: There’s now some free meal programs like Mark’s Barbecue in Essex, Vermont, and the Skinny Pancake does, they call them, ShiftMeals. They do Tuesdays and Fridays. And I was picking up meals for some people from both of those.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: She had been one of the many people who were waiting to get food at the Berlin airport. And like a lot of other people, she ended up leaving.

Rebecca Vickery: The event closed like an hour and a half earlier, and so they had been telling us there was nothing left, but then obviously there was, because people were still waiting in the line. So it was like, I don’t want to go until they’re like officially, “no, you’re done.” Because we were picking up food for three other families as well.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: She said, Oh, it was a nice day. I didn’t mind waiting. But obviously leaving without any food, especially having driven from Essex over to Berlin, I think that was definitely a frustrating experience. It took a lot of time to get there, and I think to have waited to be trying to get food was hard.

Rebecca Vickery: It was a beautiful day, and we were surrounded by people. And it kind of felt, like, normal-ish. Except for, the scope of it was the most breathtakingly — I don’t know. I’m a word person, and I don’t even have the words. Because looking at the line of people coming from both directions, I have never seen a line like that in my entire life for anything. And it was just breathtaking. Because it was like, there are so many people here, and they wouldn’t be waiting in a line like that if they did not feel such desperation to feed their families.

I was there on Friday. I saw the lines, I saw people waiting in their cars. And we’ve been seeing scenes like this both around Vermont at other meal distributions and around the country, and it’s feeling like this very powerful symbol, all these people lined up for food. Do we have a sense of how severe the problem actually is?

Elizabeth Gribkoff: We do, and we don’t, I guess, if that makes sense. Vermont Foodbank told me that during April, they served 83% more food than they do in a normal month. So that’s an incredibly drastic amount.

And I spoke with this researcher at UVM, Dr. Meredith Niles. She and some other researchers had completed a survey kind of toward the beginning of the pandemic, like end of March/early April, about food insecurity in Vermont. And they found from that survey, there’s about a third more Vermonters experiencing food insecurity right now.

Meredith Niles: There is a high level of, percentage of, people who are consistently food insecure. So they were food insecure prior to Covid and stayed food insecure. Then there is a sizable — about a third of those people aren’t usually food insecure, meaning they were not food insecure in the year prior to Covid, but they are since the Covid outbreak. And that is significantly associated with job disruption and job loss.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: She also did point out, they’re doing some followup work on that. Because she pointed out that that would have been before a lot of people maybe would have gotten unemployment benefits and things like that. So they’re curious, to what extent did receiving those benefits impact food security?

Of course, we’ve also reported on how for many, there’s some people who still haven’t gotten those benefits. So that’s just something they’re trying to get a better understanding of. What are the levels of food insecurity right now in Vermont?

What do we do about that? When you talk to advocates, and people who work in hunger relief, what do they think is the best way forward here?

Elizabeth Gribkoff: I spoke with Anore Horton, who’s the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, and something she was stressing was that efforts like that mass food distribution event in Berlin are not really a long term, or more sustainable, way to address this problem. And of course, also, we got tons of emails from readers who said they weren’t able to get food at that. So it’s certainly addressed acute needs for some people, but also clearly there were other people for whom it didn’t.

Anore Horton: Look, we have a structural problem. This is a longstanding problem that the coronavirus is throwing into sharper relief. But we’re never going to meet the unmet need by throwing more and more food box distributions at it. I mean, that’s not a long term solution. It’s not a sustainable solution. It’s an incredibly inefficient, undignified and expensive approach.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: That was federally funded. And she was saying a much better way to address this would be to have, say, an increase in SNAP benefits, so that people can go out and buy their own food, instead of having to drive and wait hours and hours to maybe get a box of food.

Anore Horton: This program is a travesty. USDA and our federal government and our federal administration chose to create a brand new, billions-of-dollars program that requires private food distribution companies to build boxes of food with specific items and then get those boxes into people’s hands through this complicated distribution system, that in Vermont involves us also paying the Vermont National Guard to do that. And then ask people who need food resources to go get in line in their cars and wait for four or five hours waiting to get food.

I mean, it’s insane. It’s an insane way to take care of one of people’s most basic human needs that we all have, when we could have just put that money into the SNAP program and expanded who can access benefits. And people could have gotten a card and gone to their local grocery store and picked out their items whenever it was convenient for them to do so.

I know there have also been these programs to distribute more meals through schools. What role does that play in this conversation?

Elizabeth Gribkoff: I think the school meal distribution plays a really important role. Because families with children are actually, and this is before the pandemic, are more likely to be food insecure. And of course for a lot of families — Meredith Niles from UVM was saying they found that people are already starting to cut back on how much they’re eating to ensure that their families are fed. So obviously if people can make sure that their kids at least have breakfast and lunch every day, that’s a huge, huge help.

There’s been free meals in schools programs before this, but they were only available to students whose families make at or below a certain income level. Whereas now there’s federal funding to have those available for any kids and teenagers 18 and under. So they don’t even have to be enrolled in a school, which advocates know, think is a good thing.

One area of concern is that, Anore Horton from Hunger Free Vermont was saying that there’s been areas where school districts that have busing, so they’re able to actually bus those meals out to families, are seeing a greater uptick in families getting those free meals, as opposed to districts where the parents or someone has to go and pick up the meals during the day.

Anore Horton: So that program has no funding in it, no extra money in it, for transportation. So that’s always been a limit on how many kids we can reach with summer meals in Vermont. Because in a lot of places in Vermont, in a normal summer, you either need to get the food to the kids or the kids to the food. But somehow you’ve got to transport one or the other, right? And there’s no money for that, right?

Those school buses stopped running at the end of the school year, in the places that even have buses. And then there’s no transportation funding. So that can’t happen this summer, or we’re going to have a really serious crisis of child and family hunger in our state. I mean, the fact that the school meal programs are operating right now and serving thousands and thousands and thousands of meals every day is why we’re not having daily long lines outside of our food shelves in our towns.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: So they’re hoping that, over the summer, they want to make sure that there’s continued funding from the state to keep busing meals to kids. She was saying, which I thought was fitting, you’ve got to either get the kids to the meals or the meals to the kids. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. Normally, before the pandemic, kids would be in school and they’d be getting the meals there. I think the transportation aspect of that, and the distribution, it’s a really important part to make that program as successful as it could be.

This week you went up to Burlington to see how the school meal distribution worked. What did you see?

Elizabeth Gribkoff: I got there at Burlington High School at 7 a.m. Had some flashbacks of arriving in high school, except there’s almost no one there, obviously, so it’s a little different. But yeah, I went in and met with Pat Teague, who’s the executive chef at the Burlington Food Project, which provides meals for kids at the 14 schools in Burlington.

Pat Teague: Here, you’re going to see tons of food just start to pile up on these carts…

Elizabeth Gribkoff: It was interesting to see how it was working. Because they’re not doing — I would sort of picture in the past, big, I don’t know, vats of chili, maybe heating up hamburgers or something like that going on at a school meals prep program. But this instead was, there was a lot of fresh food, they were cutting up cucumbers in one room. A lot of it in the morning, they take lunches and breakfast that have been bagged and put out the previous days, put them in boxes and then load them onto vans that go out in the morning for distribution at sites around Burlington.

Pat Teague: We make our own chicken salad, you’ve got a bun, Goldfish…

Elizabeth Gribkoff: After that, they go back and will be boxing up sandwiches and apples and all these lunches and breakfasts. That was something that Pat kept saying was, there’s just so many numbers and so much planning. Because now they’re doing everything like that, take out, and it has to be packaged in a certain way. And that’s very different than what they were doing beforehand.

Pat Teague: Wednesday would be say, 2000, Thursday another 500…

Elizabeth Gribkoff: One thing that’s been a big change is that now, I think there’s like 45 staff members that used to of course be spread out at schools around Burlington. And now they have shifts of 10 that will come in for two week intervals, and they’re way more spread out. They’re all now in one high school. It seems like they’ve got, at this point, got the system worked out pretty well, but I definitely think from what Pat kept saying, there’s lots of numbers in these huge spreadsheets and everything. It’s pretty intense.

It seems like there’s a really obvious need here. I’m wondering what we’ve heard so far from state government about what they’re doing to address it.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: Well, they’ve definitely been — the Agency of Education certainly has been coordinating the school meal efforts, which of course play a big role in this. But actually, advocates are saying that they think that the state needs to step up and do more to be addressing food security right now.

Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, actually recently came out with this over $50 million food security proposal from the state. So they just feel like this hasn’t been perhaps as front burner in the state’s crisis response as it should be.

At a press conference this week, VTDigger asked Governor Scott about this, and he certainly expressed concerns about long lines at places like that Berlin mass distribution, and said this is something they’re kind of looking into more, but didn’t really provide a lot of specifics.

Gov. Phil Scott: Yeah, this is a great concern to me. Obviously what we saw last week at one of the points where there were long lines at some of the food centers. I’ve asked [Human Services] Secretary Smith to take a look at the Meals on Wheels program to see how much new activity is there, as well as with the Vermont Foodbank, so that we can do an assessment of the need, as well as what we can do in the future to provide for those in need. And to encourage those who may be in need, but haven’t utilized the services to reach out to us so that we can help.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: The state does have this, it’s called a mass feeding program. It’s something that they’re submitting to FEMA, and a lot of it has to do with supporting or ramping up existing efforts, like supporting the Foodbank’s increased work and making sure the free school meals program continues. And sort of coordinating a little bit more of a statewide response to this.

So organizations like the Foodbank, which of course has drastically increased the amount of food it’s distributing, they’re saying, “we’re not really meant to be all of a sudden serving this much more food.” You know, “we don’t necessarily have the capacity or the means to be doing this long term. That’s not exactly our role.”

They see these food distribution events as kind of an emergency solution. What happens next? Like, as we look towards a potentially lengthy economic downturn, what do advocates see happening six months from now, a year from now?

Elizabeth Gribkoff: Well, something that really stuck with me was when I was talking with Meredith Niles from UVM, she was saying that food insecurity levels, not surprisingly, had gone up around 2008 during the great recession. But they stayed elevated for years after that, which kind of makes sense if you think about the long term economic recovery.

That’s something that I think I hadn’t maybe appreciated: the extent to which this could be going on for years. It’s maybe not just an acute problem. So kind of given that, Anore Horton from Hunger Free Vermont was saying that food is something — if families are on a really tight budget, and especially if they see a sudden significant decline in their budget from someone becoming unemployed — that’s something where people may start literally cutting back on what they’re eating, to ensure that they’re paying fixed costs like rent and other bills.

And so because of that, organizations like Hunger Free Vermont see really addressing hunger as addressing broader economic inequalities. They actually see things like raising the minimum wage and providing access to universal healthcare, which would ideally put more money in people’s pockets and reduce costs for things like healthcare, that would have a direct impact on then providing people with more money to be able to buy food.

Thanks Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Gribkoff: Thanks Mike.

Read the story on VTDigger here: The Deeper Dig: The hunger problem ahead.

VTDigger is posting regular updates on the coronavirus in Vermont on this page. You can also subscribe here for regular email updates on the coronavirus. If you have any questions, thoughts or updates on how Vermont is responding to COVID-19, contact us at coronavirus@vtdigger.org

As unemployment claims pour into the state and residents await their federal stimulus checks, Vermonters are tapping into another way to keep themselves afloat during the Covid-19 crisis: SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps.

The number of people applying for new or renewed 3SquaresVT benefits — the state’s branch of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — grew from a weekly average of 390 to more than 2,000 from March 30 to April 3, according to data from the Department for Children and Families, which administers the program.

While the number of new applications has since slowed, with only 698 applications last week, DCF is still noticing a big uptick in calls, said Sean Brown, the deputy commissioner of the department’s economic services division.

Vermont is not alone. While national data is not yet available, states like Georgia, California and Connecticut have reported a rise in SNAP applications. The increase comes as food banks are raising the alarm about increasing demand. 

“We’ve always understood that we are supporting the most vulnerable Vermonters,” Brown said.

But Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, said she believed the number of people applying was “very good news.”

“It means that people suddenly thrown into economic hardship knew it was available as an option,” she said.

She said it concerns her more that many of the people applying to the program may not be eligible because of federal limits on who qualifies by income and other factors. 

“There are a lot of people in Vermont right now who are not able to make ends meet, and we want everyone who’s had a change in income to apply for 3Squares and every other benefit available,” she said.

The state has taken new measures to loosen eligibility requirements for 3SquaresVT. They have suspended work requirements and waived in-person interviews. DCF is also allowing a delay for people to show that they have applied for unemployment benefits, since the claims system has reported issues, Brown said.

The federal government has also raised some benefits for people on SNAP benefits. Households will soon get their “full allotment,” meaning the most that the federal government would provide someone of their household size, Brown said.

“So if you’re a one-person household receiving $100 in benefits per month, you can go up to the maximum allowed amount of $194 per month,” Brown said.

Horton said even before the crisis, the benefits level was too low for many families to survive on. Hunger Free Vermont runs a “3SquaresVT Challenge” each year to ask Vermonters to try to live off of the benefit provided by the federal government — about $36 a week for a single person as of November 2019.

The federal government has not changed rules about where recipients can use their SNAP benefits card, called an EBT card. Since people with the card have to physically swipe it at a cash register or terminal, they typically can’t use the cards for online orders — like the grocery delivery apps that many people are using to minimize their contact with others during the Covid-19 crisis.

To try to enable 3SquaresVT recipients to use remote grocery shopping options, DCF is leasing retailers mobile “point-of-sale” terminals starting this week that they can bring to someone’s home during a delivery, Brown said.

Vermont is also one of the few states that has a “cash out” program in place for older Vermonters and those with disabilities to receive their benefits via direct deposit, Brown said. This gives qualified beneficiaries the ability to pay for deliveries or curbside pickups online or through an app.

Horton praised the work of DCF, saying the department had taken advantage of “every possible waiver and provision” available through new federal rules.

State officials are also trying to implement an extension of SNAP payments for families with children on their school’s free and reduced lunch program. DCF is working with the Agency of Education to identify households that had qualified for free and reduced lunch but were not yet on SNAP, so those families can get paid for providing their kids’ extra food.

“We think there are about 14,000 households that are eligible to receive that benefit,” Brown said. DCF hopes to issue those payments in May.

The turnaround time for some to receive benefits has not changed, DCF said. The agency took strict measures at the start of the crisis to make sure they could keep up with demand, including extending their hours and authorizing more overtime for their call center employees.

“We saw ski areas closing early on for Covid and were starting to see an uptick in calls,” Brown said. “So we started implementing those changes early.”

Most applications still start online, but people can walk into a district office and answer questions through the phone in the lobby or through a window, he said.

Despite the rise in applications, the new applications have so far been a small percentage of the 38,500 total people in the state on SNAP benefits, a decline from a post-recession high of 52,000 in 2013, Brown said.

But if the crisis continues far into 2020, the state’s caseload will start to catch up, Brown said. 

“There’s always a little delay in our caseload,” he said. “So we’re asking, what will the economy look like three months or six months out?”

Horton said the fact that it is now “easier than ever” to apply is an advantage for the Vermont economy. 

“It brings federal dollars into the state for our stores, who really need it right now,” she said.

Vermonters can apply for 3SquaresVT through the DCF website. Hunger Free Vermont also maintains a list of ways to access food during the Covid-19 crisis on its website.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Food benefits applications skyrocket amid Covid-19 crisis.

In this stressful time, we all need enough food at home to keep ourselves and our loved ones healthy. Hunger Free Vermont wants you to know that there are a number of food resources available to help you and your neighbors — we’re all in this together as part of a caring, responsive Vermont community.

If your household has reduced income, you may now be eligible for nutrition programs that help out in unexpected situations. If you’ve never used these food resources before, please know they are here for everyone. 

Please visit www.hungerfreevt.org/news/coronavirus for information about how you can apply for 3SquaresVT, school meals, WIC, and prepared meals for older Vermonters.  All of these programs not only provide access to healthy food and free up other household income, but they bring much-needed federal dollars into Vermont to support our local farmers, grocery stores, and food distributors. 

Hunger Free Vermont is committed to nourishing community connections in the midst of this health crisis, and we are standing for a future of universal nutrition programs that support us all.

Here are nutrition programs you and your family may now be eligible for:

School Meals: Most districts will still be providing meals to students during this closure. If your family’s financial situation changes you can apply or re-apply for free school meals at any time during the school year, even if you have not qualified in the past!  Contact your school for an application.

WIC:  WIC gives you access to healthy foods, nutrition education and counseling, and breastfeeding support. If you’re pregnant, a caregiver, or a parent with a child under five, WIC is right for you!  To find out more and apply visit www.healthvermont.gov/family/wic or text ‘VTWIC’ to 855-11.

3SquaresVT: Has your household lost pay? Have your childcare expenses increased? 3SquaresVT is here for you and your family to help put food on the table!  You could be eligible to receive a 3SquareVT benefit or increase the benefit you already receive. To get help applying visit www.vtfoodbank.org/nurture-people/3squaresvt, call 855-855-6181 or text VFBSNAP to 85511. Or call 2-1-1.  You can also visit dcf.vermont.gov/benefits/3SquaresVT.

Meal Programs for Older Vermonters: People age 60 and older are especially encouraged to stay at home in order to protect themselves from Covid-19, but staying well nourished is also critical for your health.  For more information about meals for older adults that can be either delivered or picked up, please call the Helpline at 1-800-642-5119.

Food assistance through the Vermont Foodbank network:  The Vermont Foodbank is dedicated to supporting Vermonters during all times of need.  To find a food shelf near you, call 1-800-585-2265 or visit www.vtfoodbank.org/agency-locator.Hunger Free Vermont will be updating our website regularly with new information to connect Vermonters to food resources. Visit www.hungerfreevt.org/news/coronavirus

Read the story on VTDigger here: Anore Horton: Feeding your family during the COVID-19 outbreak.

VTDigger is posting regular updates on the coronavirus in Vermont on this page. You can also subscribe here for regular email updates on the coronavirus. If you have any questions, thoughts or updates on how Vermont is responding to COVID-19, contact us at coronavirus@vtdigger.org

Thousands of children in Vermont rely on public K-12 schools for regular access to food. And in his directive last week ordering districts to close down, Gov. Phil Scott tasked education officials with making sure children kept getting fed, even as schools shut their doors.

With just days to plan, districts have sprung into action, retooling their food service programs to deliver hundreds of meals a day using school buses or take-out options. Every school district in Vermont is providing meals to students “in some form or fashion,” said Anore Horton, the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, which is tracking each district’s remote meal plan in a publicly accessible spreadsheet.

“Our hats go off to all of the amazing folks out there who are making that happen,” she said.

Most districts are either providing bagged breakfasts and lunches at grab-and-go sites, dropping food off along regular routes using school buses, or both. A handful are also doing home delivery.

In Burlington, home to the state’s largest school district, superintendent Yaw Obeng said in a livestreamed press conference Monday that staff had served more than 3,000 meals in the first week of remote service. Meals can be picked up at any one of 11 sites across the city, no questions asked, for anyone 18 and under. Parents can pick up meals without their children present.

The rollout hasn’t been without hiccups. In a live-chat accompanying Obeng’s press conference, one mother complained that the meal site she visited that morning hadn’t had enough food when she had come by.

Russell Elek, a spokesperson for the Burlington schools, said Monday that two sites had run out of food so far. The district is standing up a system to make sure meal sites that are running low can call food services for additional meals.

“We’re trying to put systems in place to ensure that doesn’t happen,” he said.

In St. Johnsbury, Superintendent Brian Ricca said the district had distributed about 700 meals in the first three days of service. The district’s buses and school vans are doing daily runs to drop off food along two routes. 

But Ricca also stressed that the school district had already adjusted its delivery plans several times in response to feedback, and would be happy to do so again.

“The message we really want our community to take away from this is: We will do almost anything we can to make sure that we are putting food in your hands,” he said. “So please reach out to us if our route isn’t working and we’re going to adjust.”

In the Harwood Unified School District, staff are preparing food in the Harwood high school cafeteria and shipping off bagged breakfasts and lunches to pick-up sites outside each of the district’s seven schools, three times a week. The meals are available to anyone under 18. In the first three days of service, the district served well over 1,700 meals, according to superintendent Brigid Nease.

In the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union, superintendent Jeanné Collins said more than 1,000 meals are being delivered daily using buses. Each bag contains a breakfast and lunch, and Friday deliveries will include multiple meals intended to cover the weekend. The service is available to any families with children 18 and under upon request. The buses are also delivering learning packets and Chromebooks.

“In two weeks, if still distance learning, we will take weekly assignments and pick up homework,” she said.

A majority of schools will use the federal government’s summer meals program to access reimbursements for their new food service plans. But the program won’t reimburse schools for all meals delivered unless the district has a certain number of children enrolled in its free-and-reduced lunch program.

Hunger Free Vermont is advocating with Vermont’s congressional delegation that the federal stimulus package being debated in Washington requires the USDA to waive such requirements.

In the meantime, families that have recently lost income are urged to apply to participate in their school’s free-and-reduced lunch program, Horton said. That could help schools hit the eligibility threshold needed to access universal reimbursements, and avoid a financial fallout when the pandemic ends.

The advocacy group has also compiled a resource guide to help families who need benefits access them.

Read the story on VTDigger here: How Vermont school districts are providing hundreds of meals a day.

As Vermonters turn on their furnaces and prepare for Thanksgiving, the Trump administration is once again taking aim at some of our most vulnerable neighbors. The White House and USDA recently announced their third attempt in the past 12 months to go around Congress and take food away from millions of working families, people with disabilities, and older Americans in need.  A new proposed rule change would cut SNAP (known in Vermont as 3SquaresVT) benefits by $4.5 billion over five years, including a yearly cut of over $25 million in Vermont.

If enacted, this proposal would be devastating for thousands of Vermonters who rely on 3SquaresVT to put enough food on the table to stay healthy. According to estimates from Vermont’s Department for Children and Families, if this proposal goes into effect, over 26,000 Vermont households (or 68% of recipients) would see an average cut of $82 in their monthly food benefits. The proposal would disproportionately impact people with disabilities and older adults — populations for whom proper nutrition is especially essential to health and wellness – impacting roughly 80% of these 3SquaresVT households.

Hunger Free Vermont, the Vermont Foodbank, and Capstone Community Action call on Vermonters to stand with us to oppose this latest attack by writing and sending comments to USDA by Dec. 2.

We are joining together to ask for your help because we know from daily experience what these cuts would mean for our state. Capstone Community Action hosts Central Vermont’s largest food shelf, where over 5,000 Vermonters are assisted annually with fresh produce and ready-to-eat meals. 3SquaresVT benefits are already too low to buy enough healthy food, a key reason why the need for supplemental food assistance is growing. A reduction of $82 per month represents the loss of a week’s worth of food, and will force thousands of Vermont households into impossible decisions about whether to feed themselves and their families or cover other critical needs such as heat, rent, and medical care. Already 1 in 7 children, and 1 in 10 Vermonters overall, are living with hunger. We cannot allow this shameful situation to worsen.

Private charity simply cannot compensate for the breadth of the impact of these proposed cuts. Last year, the Vermont Foodbank provided 11.7 million pounds of food to people throughout Vermont. And yet, the charitable food system in Vermont and throughout the U.S. cannot even begin to make up the difference for families who would lose their food budget through these harsh cuts to 3SquaresVT. The Vermont Foodbank is part of Feeding America’s national network of 200 food banks. For each meal that this network provides to people in need, SNAP provides nine.

As Thanksgiving approaches we should give thanks for 3SquaresVT.  For over 40 years, SNAP/3SquaresVT has been our nation’s first line of defense against hunger. This program works: it provides, on average, over 70,000 Vermonters and 40 million Americans with money to spend on food in grocery stores and farmers markets each month. It is proven to reduce hunger, help lift people out of poverty, and deliver positive short- and long-term health, education, and employment outcomes. It helps us all by bringing over $100 million into our economy each year.

There is still time to fight this proposal, but we need your help. Writing and sending a comment to USDA by Dec. 2 is the most effective action you can take to keep people from losing their money for food, and the more comments we submit, the stronger we are together. Please visit www.hungerfreevt.org/protect3squaresvt to write and send a public comment opposing this cut to 3SquaresVT, and then ask everyone you know to do the same before Dec. 2.

With 40% of Vermonters unable to handle an unplanned $1,000 expense, any of us may need to turn to 3SquaresVT for help accessing food.  Make writing your comment an act of thanks for collective programs like 3SquaresVT that are there for all of us when we need them. Now more than ever, we must all make our voices heard to protect the nutrition program that keeps thousands of Vermonters and millions of Americans from going hungry.

If you feel unable to meet your food needs, 3SquaresVT is a great resource that we can all defend and strengthen! To learn if you’re eligible, text VFBSNAP to 85511 or call 1-855-855-6181.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Horton, Minter & Sayles: Defend access to 3SquaresVT.

Attorney General TJ Donovan called on Vermonters Wednesday to tell the federal government that they disagree with its plan to remove 3 million Americans from being eligible for food stamps.

The Trump administration says the rule change will stop people from taking advantage of loopholes. Donovan, however, says the effort will result in food being taken away from people who badly need it.

Donovan and other state officials are asking Vermonters to go to www.hungerfreevt.org/protect3squaresvt to submit comments to the federal government before the legally mandated public comment period ends on Sept. 23.

He said the rule change will take away $7.5 million in food benefits that Vermonters rely on, and that the public comment period is the first way that people should be letting the Trump administration know they disagree.

“In Vermont, we have success in defeating a proposed rule,” Donovan said. “We can do this.”

In 2018, more than 3,000 Vermonters submitted comments, largely in opposition to a rule change that would have required Vermont maple syrup to be packaged with an “added sugar” label. After reviewing the comments, the FDA nixed the proposed change.

John Sayles, CEO of the Vermont Foodbank, said most of the potentially affected people are unaware of the changes and won’t until it goes into effect, leaving them unable to put food on their table or have their kids get free lunch at school.

“These people are working so hard to make every moment count in their day, they’re not paying attention to this news conference, and they’re not paying attention to what’s happening in Washington,” Sayles said. “They’re going to get that letter and be knocked back.”

He said the state has 215 food sites that are already overwhelmed by need. He said the move by the Trump administration would be akin to taking food from the hungry, calling it “gratuitous cruelty.”

“The charitable sector — Vermonters who are donating their hard earned money to organizations like the food bank and Hunger Free Vermont, making a big difference — cannot make up the difference,” he said.

Sen. Debbie Ingram, D-Chittenden, said she’s aware of people who would lose benefits, and who are not taking advantage of the system. She gave examples of a 27-year-old single mom with an infant daughter making $27,000 a year, a 62-year-old and her 59-year-old partner making $19,000 a year with just $5,000 in savings, and a 71-year-old making $30,000 a year who has custody of her 10-year-old grandson — all of whom would lose their benefits under the proposal.

“Are these the people the federal government says are exploiting loopholes in the current system?” Ingram asked. “I don’t think so. I think this is cruel and unusual punishment for those living in poverty.”

Anore Horton, the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, said her agency can say with absolute certainty that the degree of fraud in the SNAP program is miniscule, noting that it has the lowest fraud rating of any federal program.

Sayles added his agency is more worried innocent people might have their benefits cut than that a few might be gaming the system.

“We should really be thinking about ‘what’s the impact of all the people that still need it that aren’t eligible into these programs,’” Sayles said. 

Donovan said if necessary, litigation against the federal government could be considered, though for now, he said, it’s still too early. Instead, he encouraged people to make use of the comment period while they still can.

“This one is about our kids,” Donovan said. “Let’s speak up.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Donovan calls for action to oppose Trump food stamp changes.

[L]ast week, the Trump administration announced its latest attempt to take food away from over 3 million veterans, families and older Americans in need by forcing Vermont and 42 other states to change the way they have run the SNAP program (3SquaresVT in Vermont) for over 20 years. “Broad-based categorical eligibility” affords Vermont the flexibility to enable access to critical 3SquaresVT benefits for vulnerable low-income Vermonters (including working families, children, veterans, older adults, and people with disabilities). Hunger Free Vermont and the Vermont Foodbank strongly oppose this proposal, which will increase hunger and hardship for thousands of Vermonters and millions of Americans.

For over 40 years, 3SquaresVT has been our state’s first line of defense against hunger, because it works. It provides, on average, over 70,000 Vermonters and 40 million Americans with money to spend on food in grocery stores and farmers markets each month. It is proven to reduce hunger, lift people out of poverty, and leads to positive short and long-term health, education, and employment outcomes.

Categorical eligibility helps 3SquaresVT reach households that are working and may have slightly higher incomes but significant expenses (such as high housing costs, out of pocket medical expenses, and child care costs), or while working and saving a few thousand dollars for expenses like increased heating costs in the winter or a security deposit on an apartment. It makes 3SquaresVT even more effective and responsive to the needs of food insecure Vermonters, and is used by most states in the U.S. All of these households still need to apply and meet the same requirements as anyone else in order to receive benefits.

We know that many families in Vermont who are working are still struggling to make ends meet; many rely on food shelves and other assistance to feed their families. This year, 1 in 4 Vermonters will visit a food shelf. This number is far greater than the number of Vermonters who are able to participate in 3SquaresVT, which highlights that these programs already don’t do enough to eliminate hunger for many working families.

Eliminating or restricting categorical eligibility will harm Vermonters, and weaken our nation’s most effective anti-hunger program. Those likely to be affected by this proposal disproportionately are working families with children, and research shows that food insecure children have higher rates of fair and poor health, higher rates of hospitalization, and delays in cognitive development, among other health issues. Ensuring that children have access to a program that is proven to reduce food insecurity and poverty is essential – we should be increasing benefits, rather than putting working families at risk of increased hunger and hardship.

This proposal is another in a long line of attempts by this administration to demonize low-income Americans and keep them from applying for programs that help them and their families get what they need to thrive. Despite the fact that Congress recently passed a bipartisan Farm Bill that considered and rejected this change, the Trump administration is attempting to bypass the legislative branch by enacting it through administrative action.

Blaming struggling families will not solve hunger in America. The real issue is that millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet and aren’t able to access enough food to grow, learn, and stay healthy. If the Trump administration was truly concerned about food insecurity, it would be working to increase wages and improve access to housing, health care, and food assistance, instead of repeatedly proposing severe cuts to programs that support low-income Americans.

This dangerous proposal is not yet final, and there is a 60-day public comment period where individuals and organizations can have their voices heard. Together, we can fight this cruel, unjust, and unnecessary proposal and show that Vermonters believe in supporting our neighbors during times of need so that they can move out of a place of poverty. We will be launching an advocacy campaign in the coming weeks with our partners throughout Vermont and the country and will be sharing information at www.hungerfreevt.org/protect3squaresvt. We will provide support so you can take action and raise your voice to help make sure that 3SquaresVT continues to be available for all of us who may need it.

If you feel unable to meet your food needs, please still check if you’re eligible use this important resource. We’ll keep working to make it more robust and helpful. To learn if you’re eligible, text VFBSNAP to 85511 or call 1-855-855-6181.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Anore Horton & John Sayles: Trump plans to cut to basic food assistance.

[F]or food insecure families who rely on schools to provide their children with free breakfast and lunch, the summer months can be a difficult time. Luckily, Vermont does better than most at providing access to federally funded summer meals at parks, schools and campsites across the state. But advocates say plenty of children are still left out.

Last summer, 427,758 meals were served at 300 sites across the state, according to the Vermont Agency of Education. According to the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit dedicated to eradicating hunger, Vermont ranked second in the country in 2017 for participation in its summer meals program.

But Anore Horton, the executive director at Hunger Free Vermont, points out that’s largely because basically everyone is failing to reach enough children. In 2017, according to FRAC, there were 27,224 Vermont students enrolled in their free and reduced lunch program at school. That summer, fewer than 8,000 children accessed summer meal sites on any given day.

“That’s not good enough. By any stretch of the imagination,” Horton said.

She credits Vermont schools and community groups for establishing as many sites as they have, and says the problem is in large part federal policy. The USDA pays for the open meal sites, but only if they’re located in communities with high enough concentrations of poverty – one way sites can qualify, for example, is if at least 50% of children in the local school district are eligible for free and reduced lunch. Hunger Free Vermont would like to see that threshold lowered to 40%, which is about the statewide average in Vermont. It would also like families whose children are on free and reduced lunch have access to summertime EBT cards, so that they can buy food themselves.

But Horton does think the state could do more – especially in providing summertime busing to meal sites. Because in a rural state, transportation remains a key barrier to access.

“It’s also busing that goes away in the summer. That’s how we get the kids to school to eat the meals and learn,” she said.

As for families who aren’t food insecure, Horton strongly encourages them to use open meal sites anyway.

“These are community resources and they thrive the more people participate,” she said.

Because the programs are reimbursed by the USDA based on the number of meals they serve, Horton said, they’re more financially stable and better able to afford high-quality ingredients when more people use them.

“But also – we’re not then stigmatizing certain types of people in the community as the people who need this,” she added.

To find summer meal sites in your community, USDA has an interactive website where families can plug in their address. Hunger Free Vermont also keeps a county-by-county list of sites. You can also text “FOOD” to 877-877, or call 211.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont better than most states at providing summer meals to kids.

[A]fter failing to gut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, known in Vermont as 3SquaresVT) in the farm bill, President Donald Trump is now looking to sidestep Congress and slash our nation’s largest food assistance program through administrative action. A new proposed rule aims to jeopardize food assistance for over 750,000 Americans by making it even harder for some unemployed and underemployed workers to access benefits when they have trouble finding steady work, while doing nothing to help them find stable employment.

The Vermont Foodbank and Hunger Free Vermont oppose this harmful proposed rule, which would restrict states’ ability to waive time limits on SNAP benefits in high unemployment areas. The result would be billions of meals taken away from people struggling with hunger. SNAP is our nation’s largest anti-hunger program, and it works. Each month, it provides more than 70,000 Vermonters with extra money for food, keeping them nourished when they are facing hard times, and making them more resilient and better able to weather a lack of employment options and other challenging situations.

Taking food away from people struggling to make ends meet won’t help them get a job. Rather, the proposed rule would increase the risk of food insecurity for nearly one million people. USDA projects that the proposed rule would cut $15 billion in benefits from the program over a decade, and, according to calculations by Feeding America, this rule would result in a loss of more than 8.5 billion meals each year from the tables of people facing hunger. The Vermont Foodbank and its network of food shelves and meal sites simply cannot compensate for the breadth of the impact of cuts to the program, as nationally SNAP provides 12 meals for each meal provided by food banks nationwide.

Presently, unemployed or underemployed adults without dependents face strict time limits for receiving benefits if they are unable to find work. Specifically, adults ages 18 to 50 who do not receive disability benefits and do not have children are only able to receive SNAP benefits for three months, over the course of a three-year period, unless they are working at least 20 hours a week or taking part in a comparable workforce program or training.

The proposed rule targets and seeks to punish individuals who are in great need of our help — people without resources who are unemployed. The reality of low-wage employment is that individuals often face volatile job schedules and insufficient work hours, even if they are willing to work more. Many people here in Vermont who are subject to the time limit are already working, but for others things are more complicated. In a rural state like Vermont, people experience a number of unique employment barriers – lack of jobs in their community, large distances between where people live and where jobs are available, transportation barriers, and lack of career-relevant opportunities to name a few. If the proposed rule is enacted, Vermonters facing these unique barriers to employment will be at risk of losing their benefits during a time when they most need them.

Being able to put food on the table – along with access to health care and transportation, and the ability to maintain stable housing – are prerequisites to work. And when people have access to these basics, research finds they’re better able to work and have higher earnings. We urge the Trump administration and Congress to support policies that actually help workers get ahead — like raising the minimum wage, and investing in effective case management and work training programs (like ICAN in Vermont) to help individuals overcome these barriers to employment, especially in rural states like Vermont.

Hunger Free Vermont and the Vermont Foodbank are teaming up against this proposal and encouraging others to do the same. The public has until April 2 to submit comments to USDA – and it is imperative that the administration hear just how dangerous this proposal is to the health and well-being of many Americans. We encourage everyone to submit comments in opposition to this proposal, and help prevent hunger in Vermont and throughout the nation. More details about the proposal, suggested language, and directions on how to submit a comment can be found at: www.hungerfreevt.org/timelimitcomments.

Read the story on VTDigger here: John Sayles & Anore Horton: Trump changes harmful to 3SquaresVT.

[A] proposed shift in federal policy affecting immigrants who access public benefits is causing alarm among health and legal advocates in Vermont.

Experts say the controversial expansion of the so-called “public charge” rule likely would impact few immigrants currently living in Vermont.

But the possibility of any impact at all – along with concern that immigrants might forgo essential benefits due to confusion about governmental policy – has spurred a call for Vermonters to send comments opposing the policy change to federal officials before a Dec. 10 deadline.

“We want to make sure there’s as much of a Vermont voice around this as possible,” said Drake Turner, food security advocacy manager at Hunger Free Vermont.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced in September a proposed change to who might qualify as a “public charge,” an immigration term meaning a person who likely would be dependent on governmental programs and benefits.

Being identified as a potential “public charge” can be grounds for the federal government to deny permission for an immigrant to enter the United States or to become a permanent citizen via the Green Card process.

Public charge deliberations already take into account an immigrant’s participation or likely participation in benefit programs like Supplemental Security Income and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (called Reach Up in Vermont).

Homeland Security’s proposed rule would greatly expand the public charge test by allowing federal officials to consider an immigrant’s participation in programs including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (3SquaresVT); Medicare Part D low-income subsidies; and federally subsidized rental assistance.

Federal officials, in announcing the proposal, called it a clarification of “long-standing law.” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the new policy is “intended to promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers.”

But some see it differently, saying the proposal could punish lawfully residing immigrants to the U.S.

If the federal policy is changed, “going hungry and living in fear is the future facing many brave, committed people on the path to lawful permanent residence and citizenship,” said Anore Horton, Hunger Free Vermont’s executive director. “We all know that basic human needs do not change based on immigration status, and it is simply un-American to only allow citizens to access critical, lifesaving supports like food, shelter and medical care.”

Hunger Free Vermont is leading an effort to push back against the federal change. That effort also includes University of Vermont Medical Center, the Vermont Medical Society, the Vermont Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Community Health Centers of Burlington, Vermont Foodbank and the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems.

Hunger Free Vermont also released statements of support from Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger; U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt. Welch called the proposed rule “a scare tactic by the Trump administration to make immigrant families feel they must choose between feeding their families or staying together.”

While the new rule would allow federal officials to cast a wider net in searching for possible “public charges,” some say Vermont immigrants mostly won’t be affected. That’s because there are current and ongoing exceptions for refugees, asylum seekers or people applying for citizenship.

“It’s true that there are a number of different protected classes or New Americans who have not and would not be subjected to the public charge, and that includes the populations we have in Vermont,” Turner said.

At the same time, she added, “there definitely are immigrants in Vermont who would be subject to public charge.”

Also, the proposed rule change has been in the works for a while. That’s allowed concern to grow in immigrant communities, and some say that’s having an effect – even among those who would not be impacted by the new policy.

“Already, food banks across the country are seeing this take shape as immigrant families become wary of reaching out for any food assistance, whether from SNAP or through their local food shelf,” said John Sayles, chief executive officer of Vermont Foodbank.

Dr. Andrea Green, a Burlington pediatrician who said she specializes in immigrant health care, noted a similar phenomenon.

“Despite educating the immigrant families in my care about the proposal, ‘public charge’ is still creating anxiety and confusion,” Green wrote in a recent commentary published by VTDigger.org. “Recently, a family shared that they are hoping to bring grandmother to the United States to join them and help with child care, but now that means forgoing health insurance for the children. They also worry that without housing subsidies for rent, they will become homeless or have to choose between food and rent.”

Opponents of the rule change are asking for public comments to be submitted to the federal government before the policy is finalized. That can be done through instructions on the rule’s Federal Register posting or via advocacy group websites like Hunger Free Vermont or Protecting Immigrant Families.

Advocates also say immigrants should not stop receiving public benefits or decide not to apply simply because of the proposed federal rule. Even if it takes effect, the rule is not retroactive and doesn’t apply to current benefits, officials said.

Those who are considering terminating benefits or not applying for help are urged to first seek advice from groups like the South Royalton Legal Clinic, Vermont Legal Aid, the Association for Africans Living in Vermont or the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Immigrant advocates protest proposed federal policy change.

The initial Breakfast After the Bell Challenge increased the number of students eating school breakfasts by at least 20 percent in nine of the 11 participating schools, according to those behind the campaign. The results prove that the timing of breakfast and its delivery can discourage student participation, according to Anore Horton, the nutrition initiatives director at Hunger Free Vermont.

Hunger Free Vermont and the New England Dairy & Food Council — an industry-funded nutrition education nonprofit — created the program.

“It also shows that different strategies to move breakfast after the bell can work to increase participation,” Horton said. “The most effective strategy at the elementary school level is to provide breakfast in the classroom and make it universal — meaning no student is charged for breakfast. That combination of strategies led to the highest participation increase.”

In Vermont, 98 percent of schools offer breakfast, according to Hunger Free Vermont, which says about 45 percent of children who qualify for free meals — and 25 percent of all students — take advantage of it.

Horton said the campaign compared participation in March 2015 and the same month this year in schools that changed the way they served breakfast during the trial period of January through April.

Pownal Elementary had the largest increase — 171 percent — with nearly 85 percent of all students getting breakfast. Winooski High School and Middle School offered a grab-and-go meal between the first and second classes of the day and improved student participation by 56 percent from last year, with 75 percent getting a morning meal during March this year, organizers said.

John F. Kennedy School, also in Winooski, saw an identical increase in participation by offering breakfast in the classroom.

Schools that took part didn’t incur any additional costs, according to Horton. All the schools used federal money from the USDA meals program to pay for the food, and the New England Dairy & Food Council gave them grants to purchase any new equipment needed to deliver meals outside of a cafeteria.

The other schools that saw significantly more students eating breakfast were Thatcher Brook Primary School in Waterbury; St. Monica-St. Michael School in Barre; Molly Stark Elementary in Bennington; Pownal Elementary; Coventry Village School; and Elm Hill School in Springfield.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Program touts results in getting kids to eat school breakfast.