Camille Landry is a writer, activist, and social justice advocate who lives in Oklahoma City. This post is part of our “Neglected Oklahoma” series, which tells the stories of Oklahomans in situations where the basic necessities of life are hard…
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Welfare as most people imagine it doesn’t actually exist anymore. Public discourse conjures images of lazy people scamming the system and living large off their monthly government check. It’s a popular, but wildly inaccurate narrative. Welfare reform in the mid-1990s…
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The federal ‘Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations‘ (FDPIR) program provides food assistance to low-income Native American households living in Indian Country. Many households participate in FDPIR as an alternative to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), formerly the food stamp…
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By:
Gene Perry
October 20, 2011 // Updated: May 2, 2019
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,…
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By:
David Blatt
September 8, 2010 // Updated: May 2, 2019
An front-page USA Today article last week reported that government anti-poverty programs – including Medicaid health insurance coverage, food stamps, unemployment benefits and welfare cash assistance – are now assisting one in six Americans and are continuing to expand. Anyone…
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Today we released the 19th issue of our monthly Numbers You Need bulletin, which tracks monthly and quarterly data for key economic indicators. As in many recent months, the overall economic news was mixed: a slight increase in employment and…
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By:
David Blatt
January 7, 2010 // Updated: May 2, 2019
The New York Times this weekend ran an important feature on one important and disturbing sign of the impact of the recession – the large and growing population of food stamp recipients that report zero household income:
About six million…
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By:
David Blatt
November 20, 2009 // Updated: May 2, 2019
This week we released the November issue of Numbers You Need (PDF), our monthly look at key data on the state’s economy and budget. As we reported in the bulletin, one of the clearest signs of the depth and length…
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Recently, The New York Times had a front-page article spotlighting the extent to which victims of the economic downturn are able to access public benefits that are part of the nation’s safety net. Most programs, including Unemployment Insurance, food stamps,…
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As the economic downturn hits the Sooner State, we are seeing a steadily increasing number of hard-pressed families turning to the Food Stamp Program (now renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) for help in making ends meet. Food stamp participation…
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