Match resources with people
To help more eligible people get the government help they qualify for, schedule a meeting with your county’s welfare department to talk about the issue. Ideally they should be supportive of the idea of getting more eligible people signed up for and actually getting the help they need, and can provide you with an array of helpful materials including fact sheets, posters, application forms and other materials. They may even have an online application process you can access.
If that doesn’t work, check with a legal aid office, community action agency, cooperative extension office, or reference librarian at the nearest public library.
And if that doesn’t work out, go online to FirstGov.gov, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture Web site or search the Web using your state’s name and “food stamps.”
Your goal is to become familiar with the Food Stamp Program and with how a person goes about applying for the program so that you can begin sharing that information with your pantry’s clients. If you do that you will have begun a process that could ultimately reduce the number of people who might have needed to draw food aid from your food pantry by 20-60 percent.
If you go a step further and help clients fill out their applications, get to the welfare department office or provide other needed help, you can move that process further and faster. Some food pantries now have welfare department caseworkers visit the pantry from time to time to take applications. Any variation on that activity will help increase the number of people who will get the help they need.
However, let me quickly hasten to add two extremely important “Thou Shalt Nots:”
- Please do not insist that clients who may be eligible for government aid must apply for it. Sometimes people have real or imagined reasons for not wanting to do that. Please respect those concerns.
- And similarly, please don’t refuse further help to people who apply for and begin receiving government assistance. It might not be enough to meet their needs.
To fulfill the potential of this step we don’t need all-or-nothing absolutes. We just need more—more people getting more help.
