When I was in college, I didn’t have a dining budget. My parents didn’t put funds onto a college meal plan card so that I could eat lunch at the dining hall, and I didn’t have any sort of college savings set aside. I had SNAP.
I grew up in poverty, and my parents never made it above lower-middle class, so I was mostly on my own through all three of my collegiate attempts. First, in Portland, Oregon, I worked as a barista to get through one semester of part-time classes at Portland Community College. SNAP helped me feed myself during this time, but life had other plans for me, and I dropped out after my first semester.
Over the past decade, there has been a notable shift towards human-centered design in public benefits programs. Technology barriers are being re-evaluated by organizations like Nava, Civilla, and Code for America, to name a few. Thanks to these and other partners, advocates have a blueprint and field guide to apply human-centered design to digital benefits nationwide.
However, this looks at only one aspect of benefits enrollment - the digital experience. Our current view of human-centered design often focuses on technology and web design, but human-centered design should be applied everywhere, because everything is designed. City planning is a great example of this....
Fannie Lou Hamer’s life experiences inspired generations of Black agricultural resistance in Atlanta and beyond. Ms. Hamer was a sharecropper and domestic worker on the Marlowe Plantation for 18 years before she led a group of Black Mississippians to the state courthouse to apply to register to vote. She returned to an ultimatum from her employer, “either withdraw her application for voter registration or be fired…”
Still, being a SNAP participant has a certain stigma, and I surely felt the sting. I still remember the looks I would get when I would occasionally shop at the local “gourmet” grocery store. At this store, you had to tell the cashier you were using EBT before swiping your card. My face would flush, and I’d mumble to the cashier, hoping the person behind me in line didn’t hear me. If only people could look past their judgment and see how an occasional treat soothed my heavy heart, easing my worries for just a moment. Everything was so hard — why did I have to feel guilty for the type of food that I chose at the grocery store?
“Why consulting? Why not just be a conventional advocate and build a team at a 501(c)3 non-profit organization?”
This is one of the most common questions I receive from other anti-hunger advocates, especially when they are new to the field. Here’s what I tell them.
After 10 years of working in small, medium, and large non-profit organizations — first as a SNAP Outreach Coordinator and later as a Policy Director — I needed a change.
At Rachel Cahill Consulting (RCC), my team and I support and train state-level anti-hunger advocates to make the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) the most accessible and equitable program it can be in every community. While we support both legislative and administrative advocacy campaigns, for most of the year our focus is administrative advocacy. Here’s why.
First, some definitions. Administrative advocacy is any effort to improve government policies or practices by directly or indirectly engaging with agency decision-makers outside of the legislative process. The core goal of administrative advocacy is to improve the implementation of existing policies and programs. Because what’s the point of great policy if it doesn’t get implemented well - or at all - in the real world?
“Welcome to state legislative advocacy season, folks. In many states, this is the limited window of time (often just a few short months) when major state policy changes can happen - for better or for worse.
Unfortunately, there are anti-SNAP lobbying forces in state capitals who spend significant resources to convince states to adopt the most restrictive (and sometimes cruel) SNAP state options. Oftentimes these lobbyists manipulate state legislators who don’t actually know much about SNAP, but are convinced that there is a political upside to picking on the poor. When anti-SNAP bills are introduced, state SNAP advocates are often forced to drop other important work they are doing to stop these harmful provisions from making it into state law.
Two things the anti-hunger advocacy space desperately needs more of: resources and capacity, especially at the state and local levels. Sadly, we don’t currently have the level of staffing and depth of expertise necessary in every state and U.S. territory to advocate for high-impact policy changes. Local organizations are starved for resources, and when one experienced advocate leaves, years of accumulated knowledge disappears.
As consultants, we step in to help organizations accomplish ambitious goals when existing advocacy teams do not yet exist or are over-capacity. In every project, our goal is to help support and grow local policy advocates so they are well-equipped to lead SNAP policy advocacy efforts for years to come.
