November 12, 2014– Posted by Maureen McGonagle, an AmeriCorps VISTA member who just finished her year of national service with the Blacksburg Farmers Market.
How much do you spend on food each week? According to 2013 USDA numbers, “the cost of feeding a family of four a healthy diet can run $146 to $289 a week”.
Hokies using the “Major Flex” meal plan at Virginia Tech spend an average of $150/week (based on just 10 dining meals.) So what if you only have $32 a week to spend?
As an AmeriCorps VISTA serving the Blacksburg Farmers Market, I became one of the 47 million Americans who receives SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps). The average SNAP recipient receives $32 each week for food.
Living on poverty-level wages calls for very careful budgeting, and early on in my VISTA term, it became apparent that the full SNAP benefits I received were hardly ‘Supplemental’. Since I was earning so little money, these benefits became my monthly food budget—a reality for many Americans living in poverty. Faced with this situation, how do low-income families manage to buy food- particularly fresh, healthy food?
To address this issue, the Blacksburg Farmers Market has worked hard to develop programs that foster inclusivity, allowing low-income folks greater access to affordable, healthy foods.
While farmers markets provide valuable services to communities, there is often a perception that they are only available to the elite who can afford the ‘exorbitant’ market prices. Despite the lack of evidence that farmers markets are more expensive then a traditional supermarket, this perception has created a barrier to engagement at markets for folks in the lower-income bracket.
At the Market, we have been working to combat this misperception since July 2011, when we began to accept SNAP benefits as payment. A year later, we implemented the “SNAP Double Value Incentive Program”, which provides additional incentives to low-income customers who have not yet discovered the Market, or who feel that their limited budget may prevent them from shopping there.
Each time their benefits card is used, SNAP recipients receive double the amount of market tokens to shop with, up to $10. For example, $10 of SNAP benefits = $20 worth of Farmers Market tokens. The program allows these families afford the freshest, healthiest food available, despite being on a tight budget.
Since its inception, 127 households have enrolled in the program, bringing over $23,000 to the Market. I’ve experienced first-hand the power of the Double Value Program by stretching my food budget by an extra $80 per month.
As a way to highlight the importance of our SNAP Double Value Program, Virginia Cooperative Extension partnered with us to create the Farmers Market SNAP Challenge, which ran the week of October 11-17.
This exercise in empathy challenged Virginia Tech students and the surrounding community to get a sense of what life is like for millions of low-income Americans facing hunger by pledging to live on the same limited food budget as an average SNAP recipient.
Participants in the SNAP Challenge were asked to spend part of their $32 food budget at the Blacksburg Farmers Market, allowing them to experience the power of the Double Value program for themselves. By shopping at the Market on the Saturday and Wednesday of the Challenge, participants were able to expand their food budget by an extra $20, allowing them $52 to spend on food for the entire week.
The Challenge helped raise awareness to the value of this program and how it broadens access to healthy, local foods to those who might feel they can’t afford it. We also hope the Challenge educated participants about who receives SNAP benefits and how the benefits are used.
The SNAP 
beneficiaries I’ve met have come from varied walks of life and circumstances. The Challenge is a great way to help break down the stigma and shame associated with government assistance.
Once, we had a customer come into our office to quietly inquire about the Double Value Program. Upon talking to him, he began to share his story—in his previous life he was a successfully employed, making over $100,000 a year.
He was living comfortably and autonomously, until he got sick. Unable to work, he spent all his savings and eventually ended up needing SNAP benefits. Many of the faces of SNAP have similar stories of unemployment, disability, old age, and minimum wage— a landscape of unexpected or limiting life situations that leave folks with no other option but to seek assistance.
In my year as an AmeriCorps VISTA, I have come to realize that there is no one face of SNAP, just as there is no one face of poverty. Each SNAP recipient has a unique story, if we just stop to listen.
As we work educate the NRV community through exercises such as the SNAP Challenge, we hope to demonstrate how tenuous the line is between getting by and living in poverty. And we’ll keep working to break down barriers between “us” and “them”.
Maureen majored in Humanities, Science, and the Environment at Virginia Tech. During her time as an AmeriCorps VISTA member, she helped expand the Double Value Program, along with building two other Market programs, MarketKids and The Roost: Farmers Market Store.
About the Blacksburg Farmers Market: since its inception, the Blacksburg Farmers Market has worked to provide economic opportunity for small farms and food businesses, while promoting public health by providing an access point for area residents to obtain and learn about locally produced and sustainably grown food.