Sara Amberg is Manager of Agency Capacity Building of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.

The day before the February 2011 blizzard plowed through the Midwest, I heard a meteorologist report that he had never seen every radar system, every method of weather prediction all pointing to the same outcome.  This is serious, he warned. That turned out to be an understatement. The squall produced record snowfall, paralyzing Eastern Oklahoma and racking up millions in recovery costs. The historic “North American winter storm” now has its own Wikipedia page.

Indicators in the past months all forecast another dangerous storm for Oklahomans – one with a far more devastating outcome.

The USDA’s 2010 report on Household Food Security was released in September. While the nation’s food insecurity rates have declined slightly, Oklahoma’s rates continue to increase. We are officially tied with Arkansas for the highest percentage of families with very low food security.

Also last month, Feeding America released their child food insecurity data. One in four children in Oklahoma is now at risk of going to bed hungry. One-third of those that struggle with limited or uncertain access to adequate food are not even eligible for nutrition programs, such as SNAP or WIC.

The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma’s partners – emergency food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, Food for Kids programs, and senior citizen centers – reported an alarming 45 percent increase in demand for food assistance since July. The head of an emergency food pantry recently told me that the combination of drought and high unemployment has not only sky-rocketed requests for food, but has created a “devastating” landscape. Many of our partners’ neighboring farmers, who once grew our food, are now the ones asking for help to feed their families. Because of the record heat, many families did not seek out assistance over the summer and are now showing up at emergency pantries in need of not only food assistance—they need serious medical attention.

The situation on the ground is compounded by the reduction in food sourcing here at the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, where our warehouse is at half its capacity. And if we are struggling, our partners in the fight against hunger are hurting even more. In recent taskforce meetings with representatives from our agencies, they informed us that while the need for emergency food assistance has increased, donations have equally plummeted.

Meanwhile, another front is headed from Washington. The REFRESH Act, introduced in Congress earlier this month, proposes major reforms and $40 billion in cuts to agriculture programs, including $14 billion from nutrition programs. According to the Food Research and Action Center, “this proposal comes on the heels of a Farm Bureau proposal last Thursday September 29 recommending that 30% of any cuts to agriculture programs be taken from nutrition.”

In September, my own family took on the SNAP food stamp challenge. Starting with nothing in our pantries, I, my husband, and our two children tried to spend a month living off a $326 food budget, the average benefit for a household in Oklahoma. We could not accept food from relatives or eat out. We failed at the challenge, holding on by a string for 20 days.

Our middle class family couldn’t meet the SNAP challenge, but we still had money in a bank account, a working car, a steady job, reliable health care and a loving support system of family, friends and church. Take all that away and add the extreme stress of long-term unemployment or a minimum wage job, unforeseen circumstances like a broken down car or a broken leg, no personal or financial assets, a bad case of the flu, and inadequate education, and proposed cuts to nutrition programs seem ridiculous, unrealistic, and anything but compassionate.

SNAP is a “supplemental nutrition assistance program.” It is not a revolving door to the supermarket. It is not a hand-out. It is not “wasteful” spending. It is a life-vest.

Need is up. Donations are down. Add cuts to nutrition programs and you turn a serious situation into a life-threatening dilemma. We would be asking households to sacrifice with average monthly incomes of $731. Of these households, 75% include senior citizens or disabled individuals and nearly half are responsible for the care of children. Nutrition assistance programs are not the appropriate sacrifice this year, but rather the greater good needed for already struggling Oklahomans today.

We encourage the public to contact the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma or the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma to inquire about ways they can help our neighbors to weather this storm. We also implore them to contact their legislators and tell them to divert the perfect storm of hunger headed our way.

The opinions stated above are not necessarily those of OK Policy, its staff, or its board. This blog is a venue to help promote the discussion of ideas from various points of view and we invite your comments and contributions. To see our guidelines for blog submissions, click here.

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It so happened that USA Today published its report the day before the Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition held the first of five regional meetings around the state. These gathering are bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders to talk about  challenges facing low- and moderate-income Oklahomans and strategies for achieving economic security. The meeting began with a presentation on the Oklahoma Self-Sufficiency Standard, a tool for calculating the amount of income that families of different sizes and compositions need to meet their basic household expenses – housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes and miscellaneous – without public or private support or subsidies. For a single working adult with one infant and one preschool child, the hourly self-sufficiency wage is $16.43 an hour in Cherokee County and over $21.63 an hour in Tulsa County. For a two-parent family with kids that age, each working adult would need to make $10.28 an hour in Cherokee County and $12.39 an hour in Tulsa to meet its basic needs. It’s worth mentioning that this is a basic family budget with an austere set of assumptions – it includes no meals out or entertainment, no one-time purchases, no loan payments or money put aside for savings.

It’s obvious that for many working Oklahomans, there is a substantial gap between the actual wages paid by available jobs and the self-sufficiency standard. As jobs have disappeared and wage growth has collapsed over the course of the recession, the gap has certainly widened and more families have fallen into it. However, well before the downturn started, and presumably long after it ends, adults may work full-time and make the best possible decisions about how to budget their money and yet still fall short of making end meet without some form of ongoing help.

There are at least two major implications that can be drawn from the Self-Sufficiency Standard.  The first is that for this population of working families whose income falls short of self-sufficiency, identified sometimes as the working poor, access to public programs like Medicaid, food stamps, child care subsidies and rental assistance provide the critical supports that maintain family health and well-being. Research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that public safety net programs have cut the number of Americans living in poverty by nearly half, reduced the severity of poverty for those who remain poor, and helped protect Americans from the deepest extremes of poverty. As we discussed in this blog post, key parts of the safety net are seriously frayed, but for those who qualify, public benefit programs are frequently what allow low- and moderate-income working families to pay the bills and take care of basic needs from one month to the next.

Yet for families to get ahead, it will take more than public benefits and income supports. The second implication of the Self-Sufficiency Standard is the need for strategies focused on helping families achieve economic security.The Oklahoma Asset Building Coalition has chosen to focus on building and preserving assets as a key cornerstone and pathway. As OK Policy argued in a recent brief:

For individuals and families aiming to achieve economic success, the key to prosperity is the development and accumulation of assets. Assets are the basic foundations for financial security and the pathway to the American Dream.

Over the course of our remaining upcoming meetings, which will be held in Durant, Lawton, Oklahoma City and Woodward over the month of September, the Coalition will continue the work of identifying practices, programs and policies that can make a difference in building and protecting assets and expanding economic security. If you are interested in attending one of the meetings, click here for a schedule and registration information. Or click here to join the Oklahoma Assets Google group where you can share information, news, resources and questions related to asset building strategies and policies.

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This chart (which is based on DHS monthly statistical bulletins available here) shows monthly participation for both programs going back to January 2008: Both programs reached all-time participation highs in March. The 575,898 food stamp recipients that month represented an increase of 28 percent compared to 12 months before and an astounding 40 percent increase compared to March 2008. The growth in Medicaid beneficiaries was slightly less dramatic – the 690,055 Oklahomans covered by SoonerCare in March was a 15 percent increase from June 2008. The two programs now serve between one in five and one in seven Oklahomans, including an especially high percentage of children.

We would expect that as the economic recovery gains steam, these enrollment numbers will begin to level off, as more people regain employment that provides them enough income to cover their basic needs and offers private health insurance. However, we shouldn’t anticipate any swift or sudden drop in participation. Even in healthier economic times, a substantial portion of Oklahoma’s population relies on the public safety net for adequate food and medical care. And even with public programs and a vigorous network of non-profit agencies and faith-based groups, some families still fall short or fall through the cracks. But during these hard times in particular, the support provided  by programs like SoonerCare and food stamps is making the difference in helping hundreds of thousands of economically vulnerable Oklahoman households just make it through from one month to the next.

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About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.

Nationally, 18 percent of food stamp recipients in states surveyed by the Times listed cash income of zero. In Oklahoma, according to data provided me by the Department of Human Services, 48,730 food stamp households reported zero income in June 2009. This is just under one in four – 23.4 percent – of all food stamp households. Of those non-income households, there was an almost equal mixture of households with children (47 percent) and without children (53 percent). Just under 100,000 people lived in these households in June, or about one in 37 Oklahomans.

As we have discussed previously on this blog and in our monthly Numbers You Need bulletin, Oklahoma, like other states, has seen major, sustained growth in its food stamp caseload. The number of food stamp recipients, which was an early indicator of worsening economic times in Oklahoma, has now risen for 20 consecutive months and has surpassed 550,000 people, or one in seven Oklahomans. To some extent, the growing number and share of food stamp households without income reflects the program’s success in reaching and serving those in distress. In particular, recent changes in program eligibility now allow for more childless adults to receive benefits. This population is frequently ineligible for other safety net and work support programs which are restricted to parents of dependent children.

But as the Times notes, this substantial zero-income population points to gaping hopes in the social safety net, especially when it comes to providing income support to those without work. Welfare reform in the 1990′s  did not just “end welfare as we know it”; to a large extent, it ended welfare, period. Oklahoma’s Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program has expanded somewhat in recent months but still only serves some 10,000 families and less than 5,000 single parents (the remaining cases are “child-only”). By comparison, 15 years ago, in 1995, some 45,000 families received monthly cash assistance payments, almost all of which included a working-age parent.  As we noted last May, only 29 percent of unemployed Oklahomans receive Unemployment Insurance benefits.

DHS has been able to compile valuable demographic information on the population of food stamp recipients without other income – we know, for example, that about three in five iare White, one in five Black, one in eight American Indian, and one in twenty Hispanic. We know that men slightly outnumber women in zero-income households without children, while there are three times as many men as women in zero-income households with children. But what we know less well and need to understand much better is how all these households are getting by from day to day and month to month, what impact this is having on their physical and psychological health, and when their situations will improve.

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The importance of SNAP to Oklahomans is at least two-fold. As shown by the latest numbers released this week by the USDA, food insecurity remains prevalent in Oklahoma, with an average of 14.0 percent of people in the state over the period of 2006-08 indicating that they were unable at times over the year to afford adequate food.  For hard-pressed families, SNAP benefits provide an essential support to family budgets, allowing for the purchase of weekly groceries where otherwise children, seniors, and working-age adults might go hungry or without adequate nutrition. The program now serves one out of every seven Oklahomans and one out of four children. In August, the average monthly SNAP benefit was $127 per person and $296 per household.  This is a substantial increase from last September, when the average monthly benefit was $97 per person and $237 per household. The increase reflects both a 13.4 percent in SNAP benefits that was part of the stimulus package approved by Congress this spring, and declining household incomes, which has left families eligible for higher benefits amounts.

Secondly, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is of great importance to the economy of the state and local communities. In FY ’09, the USDA value of SNAP benefits in Oklahoma was $592 million, according to the annual report of the Department of Human Services, which is equal to about one-half of one percent of the state’s total GDP (PDF).  SNAP expenditures averaged $166 per person for the entire state population, and exceeded $300 per person in some low-income counties, such as Adair, Choctaw, McCurtain and Seminole. Because SNAP benefits are spent in local grocery stores and markets, they have a powerful economic mutliplier effect – according to the analysis of Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com, every $1.00 increase in federal food stamp benefit produces $1.73 in increased GDP, an amount exceeding any other form of federal spending enacted as part of the stimulus package. Finally,  SNAP benefits are 100 percent federally funded, so the program is not jeopardized by state revenue shortfalls or budget cuts during the economic downturn.

We hope that DHS’ monthly string of new caseload records will soon end as an economic recovery begins to take hold. Until then, there is little doubt that SNAP is serving a key role as a safety net program mitigating the severity of the downturn on Oklahoma families and communities.

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The Times presents a 50-state table of participation rates in six public benefit programs. Their data shows that Oklahoma is slightly above the national average in the share of eligible individuals receiving food stamp benefits (69 percent compared to 67 percent nationally); the share of eligible households receiving public housing assistance (32 percent compared to 30 percent nationally), and share of uninsured low-income children covered by public health care programs (77 percent compared to 73 percent nationally).

By contrast, we rank in the bottom fifth of states in the following:

• Just 6 percent of poor Oklahomans receive cash assistance, compared to 21 percent nationally. As we noted in a recent blog post ( “What if we threw a recession and no one showed up at the welfare office?”), TANF caseloads continue to decline in Oklahoma even as poverty rates rise, more people are out of work, and caseloads rise nationally;
• Only 29 percent of unemployed Oklahomans receive Unemployment Insurance benefits, compared to the national average of 44 percent. A measure to encourage states to extend UI to more unemployed workers was included in this year’s stimulus bill and is under consideration by the Oklahoma Legislature (see our Issue Brief on the subject);
• Our share of uninsured poor adults covered by public health insurance programs is just 31 percent, ten points below the national average, reflecting Oklahoma’s very stringent Medicaid eligibility limits for non-disabled adults. Extending Medicaid eligibility to include all adults below the poverty level, as we have argued, could assist this vulnerable population.

As the article makes clear, the safety net as a whole is a patchwork of distinct and often conflicting rules and standards which is in great need of comprehensive review and reform. With tough times continuing and state budget cuts on the horizon, simply making sure that more people don’t fall through the net entirely will be a great challenge in the months ahead.

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But rapidly increasing unemployment and stagnant incomes are not having any comparable impact on TANF, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides monthly cash assistance benefits to children and adults in very low-income households. The number of persons receiving TANF payments in January 2009 was 19,394, down slightly (-2.0 percent) from the same month in 2008. The number of adults receiving assistance has increased by 70 from a year ago, but there are 480 fewer children and 240 fewer overall families participating. This suggests a decline in child-only cases, where payment is made for a child but not for an adult (the parent or grandparent may be receiving disability payments or a pension, or may otherwise be ineligible).

The TANF cash assistance program has been withering away for years in Oklahoma. Stringent work requirements, strict sanctions policies, lifetime eligibility limits, and the concerted effort of Oklahoma DHS to divert people away from the program have all played a part. In 1993, at the peak of the old AFDC program, there was a monthly average of 43,086 adults receiving a cash assistance check. In 2001, after welfare reform, the monthly average of adult recipients was 7,730; in 2008, 3,218. Oklahoma has not just fulfilled President Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” With the program now serving less than 3,500 single parents, and showing few signs of expanding as the economy contracts, it may be fairer to say that we have ended welfare, period.

Many people who supported welfare reform admitted that we need to provide short-term cash assistance for single adults who can’t work because they are caring for children, in school or training, or dealing with other barriers to finding a job. The economic downturn is likely to hit young adults with limited education, skills, and experience particularly hard. Whether TANF proves able to provide a short-term safety net for those single parents, and what happens to that population if it doesn’t, are questions that desperately need to be asked.

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