Ashleigh Young hit her breaking point in late October. Months after rising grocery prices forced her to skip meals to keep her children fed, Young received a text alerting her that her $250 in monthly food assistance benefits were unlikely to arrive in November. That text, coupled with her son throwing out his uneaten breakfast that morning, broke the typically stoic mother of two. She began to cry.
“How do I tell my son, ‘You can’t throw away your breakfast because I don’t know that we’re going to be able to afford food next month,’” she said.
In a now-viral TikTok recorded that October day, Young tearfully explained that she had stopped eating dinner about two months before to stretch her family’s meals.
The 42-day government shutdown, which appears likely to end this week, has put extraordinary stress on 42 million people who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps. It has also expanded a relatively new form of online activism featuring people like Young who lost those benefits and turned to social media as a source of commiseration and political protest, but also found that going viral helped them pay for food.
Young’s video eventually amassed more than 2 million views. Commenters on the video asked how they could donate — and they did. Young raised $2,500 — more than enough to ensure her family could afford groceries for the next two months. She distributed much of the remaining money to food organizations and moms in her community.
Most of the money Young received came in small donations from others also struggling, like a person who sent the $8 left over after paying their bills, which they said they normally used to buy one latte a week. Young sent it back and told them they deserved the drink.
“Why should people have to choose between affordable health care [and] making sure we get fed?” Young said of the ongoing government shutdown, in which Democrats demanded that Republicans extend health care subsidies that will expire next month. “It’s sickening to me that we’re being basically used as leverage.”
People online adopt a family in need
Grassroots initiatives make up the bulk of the online efforts to feed neighbors.
In St. Louis, Lucy Novario received an avalanche of messages when she posed a simple question on Facebook: Will anyone need extra support with their grocery bill in November, given the SNAP pause?
“To be honest, it got pretty overwhelming pretty quick with the amount of people that were reaching out, and their situations were pretty dire, pretty scary,” Novario said.
Novario said because there’s “still shame about receiving benefits,” neighbors messaged her privately to let her know how much money they’re now missing since SNAP payments have lapsed. A pregnant mother due in a few weeks who gets $100 monthly in benefits. A family with three children that receives $1,158 a month. A disabled caregiver of three who receives $546 a month.
Novario then posted on Facebook again, asking other community members to pitch in, “adopt” a family, and send donations to her Venmo account, so that she could forward them to those in need of help. Novario said she has received donation amounts ranging from $5 to $400.
On Facebook, a search for “adopt a SNAP family” produces hundreds of posts — some from people seeking help and others from community members looking for ways to provide support.
Mike Walker has for years helped run “adopt-a-family” programs at Serve 6.8, a community organization in Colorado. Around the holidays, the organization usually gathers donations to serve Thanksgiving dinners to about 19,000 families. However, because of the SNAP crisis, Walker said the organization is seeing increasing numbers of families requesting assistance.
“We’re just flooding that system with food provided by our church partners that are guaranteeing that families will have access to greater quantities and a better selection of foods that would be able to replace some of the SNAP benefits that they would be receiving,” Walker said.
Walker said the group relies on a network of churches and volunteers to gather donations for its operations, as well as Nextdoor, a social media site for neighborhoods. That grassroots tool, he said, has been key to organizing neighbors’ support of each other.
“These secondary networks … are really integral to the everyday lives of people,” Walker said.
Apps connect community members
Propel, an application that its company says about 6 million SNAP recipients use to track their benefits balance, and GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that allows donors to directly send money to individuals in poverty, launched a program to send donations to Americans most likely at risk of food insecurity because of the pause in SNAP funding.
Using Propel’s user data on SNAP recipients, the organizations identified households with children who receive the maximum SNAP allotment — a top indicator of extremely low income. The organizations began sending $50 payments to thousands of families, money raised through GiveDirectly’s online platform. As of Monday, the organizations had raised nearly $13 million for its SNAP project.
“[We] directly recognize that the work we’re doing is not a substitute,” said Sarina Jain, a senior manager at GiveDirectly. “It’s not a replacement for services or resources provided by the government, but we really see the role we can play.”
Dominick Greer, a single father of five children in Minneapolis, is one of the Propel users who received the $50 credit. While Greer said he usually gets his SNAP payment on Nov. 3, this year he could put together meals for his children through a combination of the Propel payment and relief he found on Facebook: Several restaurants in his area posted about providing free meals.
Asking for help online isn’t always met with kindness
While many people have cheered the online fundraising efforts, some pockets of the internet have been critical toward those who struggle to make ends meet.
Breanna Buckhalton, a 26-year-old mother of six — including three foster children she took in this summer — posted a video of herself crying in reaction to the SNAP cuts.
“I’m so terrified,” she said in the video, after which her comments were filled with people questioning her past financial decisions or policing how she could use the assistance.
Still, posting to social media helped cover some of the missing $975 of aid she should have received in November: One person who saw the video sent her $50, and a video licensing group paid $800 for the usage rights.
“Nobody’s going to make me feel scared or ashamed for the help that I get,” Buckhalton said. Recalling the most offensive comment left on her video, she said, “It was like ‘Black people need to start paying White people reparations because y’all been living off our backs your whole life.’”
Savannah Berry’s TikTok about food stamps also went viral, with more than a million views. In it, the 18-year-old freshman at Southern Oregon University, who has been on food stamps her whole life, ate while looking at the camera and, addressing President Donald Trump’s supporters, wrote in on-screen text, “my dinner today was bought with food stamps. thanks to you guys, my family’s thanksgiving dinner won’t be. but i’m glad we’re making america great again.”
Berry said in an interview that her parents work full time but still cannot afford to feed their family without aid. But that nuance could not be fully conveyed in the span of a short video. Soon, her post became inundated with negative comments from people calling food stamp recipients “lazy.”
She turned the comments off.
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