Cheri Andes: Advancing nutrition and attacking poverty. Let’s make it happen – Yahoo News
There was a time in my family’s life when orange juice was a luxury, and we gained far too much weight eating excessive amounts of pasta and ramen noodles.
We lived in Main South, Worcester. My husband was a teller at Fleet bank making $14,000 a year, and I worked part time at a school. We made too much money back then to qualify for food stamps, but not enough money to make it financially until the end of the month.
My husband’s parents would come to our rescue, and invite us over for salmon dinners, which my two-year-old son quickly learned to love. It was the best food he had eaten all month. We used to joke that he was the only two-year-old in Worcester eating salmon for leftovers the next day for lunch.
These were not the good old days. My son was sick too often, and my marriage was stressed almost to the breaking point.
For one fifth, or 20%, of the city of Worcester’s residents, life in poverty is today’s reality. But the year is 2022, not 1992, and fortunately at least a few things have changed for the better. The political leadership in Massachusetts, led by U.S. Rep. James McGovern of Worcester, whose passionate support of hunger issues spans decades, has helped create a more robust public support system for families and their children.
U.S. Rep. Richard Neal of Springfield, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey have been exceptional leaders in this arena as well. Combined, their leadership has brought us three important programs to keep hunger and poverty from rising during the pandemic: expanding child nutrition programs like free school meals, the Summer EBT Program, and the Child Tax Credit (CTC).
However, the continuation and expansion of all three of these programs are part of President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation that is currently being held hostage by Senator Manchin of West Virginia. President Biden recently announced that he will likely begin to break up the omnibus legislation into pieces that will have political support for passage. It is imperative that these three programs are included in any such strategy.
The legislation calls for historic investments in child nutrition programs by first expanding the Community Eligibility Provision, which increases the number of schools offering meals to all students at no charge. This provision would allow an additional 234 schools in Massachusetts to provide more free school meals to students.
When schools close, families who struggle to put food on the table lose access to healthy free or reduced-price school meals for their children. The result is increased food insecurity among families with children. The existing summer nutrition programs are designed to replace school meals and often support much-needed summer programming.
But the reach of these meals is too low, serving just one child for every seven who count on free or reduced-price school meals during the school year. The second program, the Summer EBT program in the Build Back Better Act would provide a $65-per-month grocery benefit on an electronic benefit card for the summers of 2023 and 2024.
Evaluations of Summer EBT demonstrations have found that they reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition. Roughly 446,000 low-income children in Massachusetts would qualify for Summer EBT benefits.
Finally, enacted in March 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act increased the Child Tax Credit and made it available through monthly payments for more than 65 million U.S. children — roughly 1 million children in Massachusetts.
The enhanced tax credit has enabled parents across the country to pay for food, clothing, housing, and other necessities, and research by Columbia University has shown that it has lowered the number of children experiencing poverty by 30 percent as compared to child poverty levels in the absence of the expansion.
But Congress must pass the Build Back Better Act or some other expansion bill to maintain this progress. As it stands, the last CTC payment went out on Dec. 15, and many families are struggling once again to make ends meet. In Massachusetts, 159,000 children are at risk of slipping back below the poverty line or deeper into poverty because the CTC monthly payments have now ended.
The Massachusetts congressional delegation, led by Congressmen McGovern, Neal and Senators Warren and Markey, must do everything in their power to protect and advance these three programs.
The state of Massachusetts, and indeed, the families and children of this nation, need their leadership at this critical moment in time. We are grateful for their leadership and support them in this important work. Onward.
Cheri Andes of Millbury is senior regional organizer – Northeast for Bread for the World
This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Cheri Andes: Advancing nutrition and attacking poverty. Bread for the World
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