Your Investment at Work
Bolstering Food Security for Families
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) helps 42 million people, including 10 million Latinos, put food on the table each month. Four out of five SNAP families include children, older adults or people with disabilities, and the vast majority are working families.
Passed last summer, the budget reconciliation bill, often referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (H.R. 1), slashed SNAP by nearly $200 billion, the largest permanent cut to the program since its creation in the 1930s. This means 20 million families will receive less assistance paying for groceries. And while Americans of all backgrounds will suffer, the Latino community will bear the brunt of the harm. More than 1 in 5 Hispanic families already experience food insecurity — twice the rate of white families. And almost a third of Latino adults have gone into debt to pay for groceries — more than any other racial or ethnic group.
Changes introduced under H.R. 1 have created new verification requirements, administrative burdens and confusing, unclear information about SNAP eligibility, all of which threaten to reduce enrollment and retention in the nation’s largest nutrition assistance program. These new burdens are colliding with an environment of aggressive immigration enforcement and data privacy concerns. Faced with misinformation and the fear of being tracked, many eligible families are opting to disenroll or avoid the program entirely, driving a sharp increase in food insecurity.
Thanks in part to the fastidious support of donors like you, UnidosUS is launching a new initiative to bridge gaps in information, infrastructure and organizational systems, thereby helping more families access SNAP. Through the Bolstering Food Security for Families project, we are connecting UnidosUS Affiliates nationwide to share expertise and strengthen peer-to-peer support. We are starting this work in California, Illinois and Texas, where large SNAP-eligible populations face complex local challenges. Each Affiliate will design solutions that engage local leaders and respond to the specific needs of their own neighborhoods and states.
These efforts will strengthen SNAP enrollment, retention and awareness through locally driven implementation, along with organizational readiness to support families navigating the new requirements. UnidosUS and its partners anticipate reaching more than 30,000 individuals with SNAP education and outreach and assisting between 5,000 to 10,000 households with SNAP enrollment across the three states. This is only a sliver of what we can achieve. With added support for our partners and families, we can grow this work and deepen our impact.
SNAP has long fueled our economy by helping nourish, stabilize and strengthen families. No child, youth, senior or working parent should be forced to go hungry when our country has the resources to ensure that every family can live in dignity and raise children who grow up healthy and strong.
