Northfield, MN—SARAH NEVER THOUGHT OF HERSELF as a person who would ever need to ask for help—especially from the U.S. government.

But when her husband, Rob, lost his job as a construction worker here in 2006, she felt obliged to apply for food stamps, or “SNAP benefits” as they are now called.

She did it so she could feed her five children.

“It was really difficult for me to humble myself to do something like that,” she says.

Rob “immediately started looking for another job, of course,” Sarah recalls. “But he couldn’t get a job in construction. Nobody was hiring. Everyone was just laying people off. So he had to turn to another field. He put in some applications at factories, and didn’t hear anything back.”

Sarah and Rob lost their home. And then their car. Sarah was pregnant at the time.

“It was a really difficult time in our lives,” she says. The names of all SNAP participants mentioned in this article are pseudonyms, as they wished to remain anonymous.

Two years after they finally conceded to asking for help, Sarah and Rob still rely on food stamps, and they are hardly alone: SNAP enrollments rose 67 percent in Minnesota between 2009 and 2013, from 165,000 to 275,00 recipients, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Northfield has not been exempt from that trend, resulting in today nearly 13 percent or 2,600 of its 20,000 residents having incomes low enough to make them eligible for food stamps.

Sharply rising poverty in Minnesota, again reflecting nationwide trends, accounts for much of the increase in food stamp enrollments. Childhood poverty, which affects most SNAP households, has been especially severe in Minnesota, rising 62 percent in the past decade, according to the Children’s Defense Fund of Minnesota.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) assists nearly 50 million low-income Americans like Sarah and Rob each year to purchase food. Delivering $76.6 billion in benefits in 2013, it is by far the largest U.S. government safety net program to prevent domestic hunger.

Sarah and Rob connected to SNAP originally through the Northfield Community Action Center (CAC), a non-profit organization that seeks to meet the basic needs of Northfield’s low-income residents. The CAC serves 1 in 13 families in the Northfield School District by providing resources and advocacy to low-income families through programs that range from food and clothing distribution to job skill development.

Any Northfield household that earns income of $47,000 or less per year can access the CAC’s food shelf, the job skills training or any of its many programs. The $47,000 figure is twice the U.S. government’s official poverty line threshold of $23,050 total yearly income for a family of four.

Most of the families that actually use CAC services, however, earn $20,000 annual income per family or less, according to Jim Blaha, the executive director of the group. Almost all are working families, he said.

Despite strong community support through resources like the CAC, many Northfield residents still struggle to get by.

Just last January, after two years of fierce partisan haggling over entitlement spending, the U.S. Congress voted to cut the SNAP program by $8.6 billion over the next decade, or about 1 percent of annual spending on SNAP benefits.

The budget for food stamps is the biggest portion of spending in the U.S. Farm Bill, the omnibus food policy bill of the U.S. government, which is passed every five years and currently stands at nearly $1 trillion dollars in annual spending.

Many Republicans protested that SNAP oversteps the role of government and creates dependency on assistance by disincentivizing people to work to earn their own income. While politicians argued about SNAP, rural America waited anxiously for the bill that also authorizes crop insurance and agricultural subsidies to pass.

The one percent annual cut to SNAP benefits means that 850,000 recipients nationwide will lose around $90 each month in benefits in 15 states and the District of Columbia, according to Feeding America; House Republicans had originally sought a five-percent cut from SNAP.

Fortunately, this year, thanks to savings caused by closing an expensive loophole in the SNAP eligibility requirements (concerning the federal Low Income House Energy Assistance Program), Minnesota SNAP recipients will be little affected even by the 1 percent cut on SNAP funding nationwide.

For Minnesotans receiving food stamps, this one-time escape from SNAP budget cuts comes as a big relief, as they had already seen their average benefits drop every year since 2010, from an average of $248 to $234 per month.

The 2009 Recovery Act, part of Obama’s economic stimulus package, aimed to jump-start the American economy during the recession, temporarily boosted SNAP benefits. Average benefits in Minnesota have steadily declined since 2010, as the recovery stimulus money has tapered off, and as recipients have gone back to work in the recovering economy. The Recovery Act expired this past November.

Nearly all participants nationwide saw a sharp drop in their food stamp benefits at the end of 2013—Northfield residents were no exception.

In the past four years, the number of Minnesotans receiving Food Stamps has increased as the average monthly benefit for a Minnesotan family has decreased.

In Northfield, only seven percent of households actually receive SNAP benefits, compared to the 13 percent that are eligible.

In some cases that is good news for the city as many residents chose to rely of the CAC’s nutritional programs for the elderly and impoverished, instead of on SNAP. The vast majority of households in Northfield that do choose to participate in SNAP are families with children.

In Rice County, 70 percent of households that receive Food Stamps are families with children. Between 2008 and 2012, largely as a result of dramatically increasing poverty rates in this state and nationwide, the percentage of children in Rice County that participated in the program rose from 9 to nearly 17.

Strong community support through CAC and other local non-profits has also helped to boost local enrollment rates in federal assistance programs like SNAP, Blaha said. Some progress has also been made in reducing the stigma around using food stamps that has long caused low-income Americans to resist asking the government for help.

Across the state of Minnesota, participation in the SNAP program has increased dramatically in the past five years. Despite a clear increase in demand, the consistent paring of SNAP benefits does not make life any easier to manage for low-income Minnesotans.

Melody, who has lived in the Northfield for much of her life, does not know where she would be without the monthly SNAP stipend. In late 2009, a traumatic brain injury from a car accident left her unable to work.

A single mother of a daughter and a son, Melody began receiving food assistance shortly after her accident in order to feed her children. When she was injured, she lost her income and her health insurance.

Each month, though, she still strives to repay the student loans she took for the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees she received before the accident.

The biggest challenge for Melody has been making the $475 in monthly food stamp money she receives buy three meals a day for herself and her two children for an entire month.

“It sounds like a lot,” she says, “But with two growing kids, and sometimes three meals a day and snacks…it goes so fast.”

To stretch the funds, she makes a menu for each month, and plans each meal. “I try to be really good,” she adds. “I try to use my money very carefully.” Still, she can never make the money last the month.

As a result of the SNAP benefit cuts to Minnesotans explained above, Melody’s benefits have decreased by $30 by month since the started the program in 2010.

“I ran out every month anyway,” she recalls. “And now I run out sooner than I would have. I would usually be able to stretch it until just a couple days.”

But these days, after the $30 a month drop in her monthly benefits, her family now goes an entire week, and sometimes more, without money for food every month.

In February, she ran out of money 10 days before she would receive the next stipend, and for a week could only afford to buy milk.

Melody shops at both Econofoods and Cub Foods, the two main grocery stores in Northfield, and occasionally makes a trip to Faribault.

The first thing that had to go when Melody’s benefits were cut in November when the Recovery Act expired was fresh fruits and vegetables. They are not in her budget.

“We get enough food,” she grants. At least her children are not hungry.

“But to eat the way that I would want my kids to eat—the way I would want to eat—no, we can’t do that. There are a lot of boxed meals, which is fine, but that’s not how I would prefer to feed my kids.”

It is also a challenge for Melody to say no to her two kids when they tire of eating the same things day after day. It can be difficult to watch their heart break each time they are told they cannot have a bag of chips or a pack of gum. “But we have to do without,” she sighs.

“Someday, I hope to be able to buy them that pack of gum.”

Even though Northfield residents came out of the recent two-year Congressional impasse relatively unscathed, the accusations of welfare dependency and fraud thrown around in debates about Food Stamps trouble those Northfield residents that rely on the program during hard times.

“It got us back on our feet,” Sarah claims.

Sarah credits SNAP benefits with helping them to raise themselves out of their financial trouble. They started with around $500 each month, which she said was plenty to buy food for their family of seven.

“Right in the beginning,” Sarah says, “when Rob wasn’t making much money, it totally took care of us. We’d have $20, $30 left at the end of the month.”

The extra support made it possible for the family to look towards making more permanent changes. Once they started the program, Rob was able to find a job with a welding company in New Prague that eventually asked him to go to school full time.

Before receiving SNAP benefits, Rob would not have been able to take time away from his three part-time jobs to go to school. As he has earned more and more certificates, Rob has worked his way up his new company’s ladder, and hopes that soon they will consider him for a coordinating position.

Because the amount of monthly food stamp benefits is adjusted according to income, the amount of monthly benefits awarded decreases as income increases.

Thus, as a result of Rob’s progress at work and gaining more income, the family’s monthly SNAP benefits have dropped to about $100 a month.

But for every $100 per month drop in food stamp benefits, Rob has not always made $100 more per month in income. Thus, the process of weaning off of food stamps can be a big challenge in itself.

Sarah and Rob do not want to be in the program forever, so they have tried to make do with the benefit decreases, even though it means they sometimes have to “pinch” more than ever.

Northfield recipients generally believe that SNAP is good for the community, but they understand that it is not perfect. The Farm Bill probably will not fix those flaws.

Sarah believes politicians should consider the impact on Americans like herself when considering cutting SNAP—“People should know that there are families that this program is providing for that don’t want to be on it all their lives—that want to use it when they need it, and be done with it. And want to live off their own success.”

Very soon, the family hopes to be off the program, Sarah says.

For Melody, the greatest flaw of the program is the extremely small amount she receives, even though she has no income. Like many Minnesotans, she has already experienced cuts in her monthly SNAP benefits, and when she thinks about the possibility of more cuts she is overcome by hopelessness.

Right now, though, Melody just hopes that her benefits will not be reduced any more than they already have been. She says that the people who want to cut SNAP benefits need to look beyond the few people that use and abuse the program, to the people like her who have no choice.

“They need to look at the people who do use the system and how it will affect their lives—my life, my kids’ lives.”

To contact the author:

Emily Lamberty: lamberte@carleton.edu

This article was written and published as a part of the Winter Term 2014 “Journey in Journalism” class at Carleton College.

Copyright @ 2014 Emily Lamberty