Most of the time when people think about food assistance for those that are food insecure, they think about the national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP — program, what many of us used to know as food stamps.
However, as impactful as this program is, there are more than half a million people in Maricopa County who are food insecure, and more than a quarter of a million who don’t qualify for SNAP because they make a little too much money to qualify for SNAP and other nutrition assistance programs and struggle to provide healthy, nutritious meals to their family.
At Paz de Cristo Community Center in Mesa, we’ve started the SNAP Gap Food and Empowerment program. We focus on serving the more than 108,000 people in our geographic district (data from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap report) that fall into this gap — they are above the income threshold to qualify for SNAP and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), a USDA program that provides food boxes to struggling families, yet they struggle to get enough food on the table for their families.