North suburban food pantry directors worry that spending cuts in President Donald Trump’s sweeping megabill could seriously disrupt the lives of the most marginalized from Skokie to Northbrook, causing people to go hungry.
After the Trump administration slashed the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by a projected $186 billion nationally, food pantry directors in the Skokie and Northbrook areas said the lower-income people who come to them would likely have to make hard choices between whether to pay rent, get medicine or buy food.
And it could start as soon as February, one food pantry director cautioned.
“We have a food pantry that already serves thousands of people every month. It’s a great resource, but it is just one resource,” said Ruth Orme-Johnson, Niles Township Director of General Assistance.
Noting that the Niles Township Food Pantry gets about 80% of the food it distributes from the nonprofit Greater Chicago Food Depository, Orme-Johnson commented, “For every meal that the Greater Chicago Food Depository can provide a family, SNAP can provide nine additional meals.”
“[The food pantry] is not going to be able to feed everyone — it’s not going to be able to replace SNAP,” she said.
SNAP is managed in Illinois by the Illinois Department of Human Services as the Link program. Every month, IDHS loads cash onto a client’s Link card, similar to a debit card, and clients can spend it at grocery stores.
Eligible SNAP recipients must earn within certain income brackets based on family size and meet other key criteria to receive cash assistance.
Governor JB Pritzker’s office estimates SNAP cuts could impact 360,000 people across the state.
The Niles Township food pantry serves around 5,500 Niles Township residents who earn less than 200% of the poverty rate, or $53,300 for a three-person household.
Asked when the SNAP cuts will affect Chicago-area residents, Orme-Johnson said, “We don’t really know. Nobody really knows.”
The SNAP program requires participants to work, though Illinois participants are not currently affected by it because of a statewide waiver in place. However, that waiver expires in January, she said.
Work requirements in the Republican spending plan could inadvertently kick people off of SNAP that depend on it to survive, Orme-Johnson said.
In one example, Orme-Johnson said she knew of an individual with Stage 4 cancer who had not been able to work for some time. Despite submitting her disability application to the federal government over a year ago, her disability status has yet to be approved, Orme-Johnson said. It’s likely the process has lengthened, she said, after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency made cuts to the Social Security Administration.
Without having a proper work exemption in place because of her disability, the individual is at a higher risk of losing her SNAP benefits, Orme-Johnson said.
“I can’t imagine having the time or the ability to work, and she [the cancer patient] is going to lose the way she pays for groceries, with the way the (megabill) is written right now,” Orme-Johnson said.
“Nobody can guarantee her that there is going to be a work-around so that she can keep her benefits between now and when they could possibly be taken from her.”
Apart from SNAP benefits, residents can visit the grocery store-style Niles Township food pantry twice a month, and can also select toiletries, including COVID-19 tests and paper towels, which are not covered by SNAP.
A person does not need to be a SNAP recipient to receive items from the pantry, according to Orme-Johnson.
The Niles Township food pantry does not receive funds from SNAP, but cuts made to SNAP could increase demand for the food pantry, Orme-Johnson explained.
Over at the Northfield Township Food Pantry, Roxanne Dunn, the pantry’s communications and community outreach coordinator, said the demand for more services from the food pantry could arise independent from proposed SNAP cuts.
“We’re not really focused on SNAP [cuts]” Dunn told Pioneer Press. About half of the recipients of Northfield Township receive the subsidy, but it can often amount to little cash. The megabill “has a lot of other provisions in it that are going to cause a lot of other social safety net issues… there’s going to be a whole different level of hurt that we start to feel,” before the SNAP cuts are felt in Illinois, she said.
“High utility bills, cuts to health care that are provided for people are going to put them in a different, tight spot, in a different way,” Dunn said. “Not all of our families that we serve receive SNAP benefits,” she added.
According to the Northfield Township food pantry’s Coordinator Julie Schaeffer, it serves between 850 to 900 families a month, and while recipients can get food from the pantry every seven days, the majority visit the food pantry once a month, she said.
As to how the pantry would react when SNAP cuts are eventually made, Schaeffer said she didn’t know how those cuts could affect Northfield just yet.
“We’re not going to know if that’s going to mean more clients, more frequent visits… fewer donations. We just don’t know,” Schaeffer said. “There’s a lot of a lot of gray [area] right now.”
An increase in demand could create the need for the pantry to reduce the amount of food each family gets at each visit, and how often that family could visit the pantry, she said. On the administrative side, the pantry would seek additional funders, she added.
Orme-Johnson had a more bleak estimate of what the SNAP cuts could look like in Niles Township and Skokie.
“What we’re going to see, I imagine, is going to be an increased number of people at our food pantry… We have some financial assistance available here at the township that we use to provide medical and food assistance to people who earn low incomes, and we’re going to have to be responsive to that,” Orme-Johnson said.
“We’re going to see rising numbers of people using emergency rooms instead of regular doctor’s offices, because they’re going to have to wait until that point to get their needs met,” she said. “We’re going to see a lot of systems, a lot of soup kitchens and food pantries, overrun… In Skokie you’re going to see people that are sick and hungry, and you’re going to probably see them more prevalently in public.”
“It might be something where you see more people on the street who are asking for help because they’ve had to use the money that they have to be able to pay for whatever food or medical care they need, and they no longer have benefits that are allowing them to stay housed,” Orme-Johnson said. “It’s going to be a very scary potential future.”