A stunning front page article in the Sunday November 29 New York Times reports that 1 in 8 Americans, and 1 in 4 children, now receive food stamps.

In California only 50% of those eligible are receiving the help, while in Missouri, it is 98%. This last statistic reminded me of one of my early organizing jobs, where I built a network of social service agencies in a two-county region to help eligible people learn of their right to food stamps. We helped hundreds of families build a better nutritional basis for their kids. Then, in 1981, in the aftermath of Proposition 13, the state legislature eliminated California’s Food Stamp Outreach Program.

Now, nearly thirty years later, tens of thousands of eligible children and their parents are going hungry, simply because they don’t know how to access the program.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under Assorted Musings, Recommended Reading, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.