Hungry Heroes

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/07/13/dod-5000-military-families-losing-food-stamps.html

Jul 13, 2013 | by Richard Sisk

The House action that stripped food stamp funding from a massive farm bill would threaten vital assistance for about 5,000 military families, mostly from the junior enlisted ranks, Pentagon officials said Friday. [The food stamp bill eventually passed, with cuts in funding due to Republicans.]

A Department of Agriculture report last year showed that more than 5,000 of the 48 million Americans receiving Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program (food stamps) listed their employment status as "active duty military," the Pentagon officials said.

"Military members who receive SNAP tend to be made up of members in junior pay grades with larger than average household sizes," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Defense Department spokesman.

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"Military members normally 'promote out' of the need for additional subsistence benefits, due to the corresponding raises in basic pay and other allowances as one moves to a higher pay grade," Christensen said in an e-mail statement.

"It's a small population but it's a vulnerable population," Joye Raezer, executive director of the National Military Families Association, said of the active duty military families receiving food stamps.

Older recruits who already have several children and join the military because of the poor job market tend to need SNAP, Raezer said. "If you're junior enlisted and you're single, fine," Raezer said, but if the servicemember has children and a non-working spouse, "you're going to be on food stamps."

"It gets tough, even with a housing allowance," Raezer said.

The 5,000 military families receiving food stamps was a tiny percentage of the 48 million recipients nationwide, but it was a major increase over the previous year when the Department of Agriculture reported that only 1,000 recipients listed "active duty military" as their employment status.

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http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/military-families-turn-food-stamps

by Krissy Clark
Monday, May 25, 2015

What do we know about food stamp use in the military?

Every year the Department of Agriculture publishes data about where food stamp benefits (officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) are being spent. The categories range from grocery stores and super stores to convenience stores and farmers markets. Also on the list, surprisingly, are military commissaries — those stores on military bases that sell groceries just above cost to active duty and retired military personnel and their families, as well as those in the reserves and National Guard.

In 2014 more than $84 million-worth of food stamp benefits were spent at military commissaries. That’s just a fraction of a percent of all the food stamps spent in the U.S. last year. But the number is sobering when you think of who is doing this spending — people who served or are currently serving our country and are still having trouble making ends meet.

Do we know how many active-duty military personnel are on food stamps?

The numbers are hard to come by. Neither the military nor the USDA tally those numbers, but recently the USDA estimated that between 2,000 and 22,000 active-duty military members
used food stamps in 2012, the latest data available.

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What about veterans?

The USDA estimates that in 2012, more than 1.5 million veterans used food stamps, or about 7 percent of all veterans.

How low does your income have to be to qualify for food stamps?

Pretty low — though it depends on how big your household is. A single person has to be grossing less than $15,180 a year. For a family of four, the annual income threshold is $31,008.

So what is military pay these days?

If you are a very junior member of the military on active duty, your annual base pay can be less than $19,000. Add in housing and food allowances and it can go up to the high $30,000s. But if you've got a big family, if your spouse isn't working (which, if you're moving around from base to base or if one parent is overseas can often be the case), that money may not go too far. You might very well qualify for food stamps, or at least find yourself struggling to get by.

What kinds of financial challenges face military families?

Jennifer Daelyn grew up in a military family and now runs the Hand Up Youth Food Pantry near Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base north of San Diego. When she tells people that she helps a lot of active-duty military families, “often people are really surprised that it's even needed,” she says. “They're like ‘they don't need that — that doesn’t really happen.' But it does.”

Daelyn says she hears common concerns from the military families she serves. “They might have things set up if everything is going as planned, but if unplanned costs arise — someone needed to get new tires for their car, or had an unexpected pregnancy, it's difficult to handle considering the financial situation that they're in.”

And then there’s the added challenge that military families are moved around a lot. “It can be hard to maintain family and social support networks,” Daelyn says. “People who are in different states than their parents, than the kids’ grandparent that was providing support for them emotionally, financially, just with coping.”

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http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/hungry-heroes-25-percent-military-families-seek-food-aid-n180236

Petty Officer 1st Class Adam Yetter, a Navy sailor for 17 years, works a second job as a security guard and donates blood plasma twice a week to help make ends meet for his family. Deployed seven times during his military career, including an extended 19-month tour to Iraq, Yetter squeezes in family time with his three young boys and his wife in-between jobs.

To save money, the Yetters recently moved off base into a two-bedroom apartment they share with another sailor and his two sons, who stay there part time. Despite their penny-pinching efforts, the Yetters have been living paycheck-to-paycheck for many years as they work to get rid of debt accumulated over everyday expenses like car repairs and gas and the costs of caring for an autistic son. They often visit food pantries to keep their kitchen stocked.

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Yetter’s family is among the 620,000 households that include at least one soldier, reservist or guardsman – or 25 percent of the nation’s total active duty and reserve personnel – that are seeking aid from food pantries and other charitable programs across the country, according to a rare inquiry about the food insecurity of troops and veterans conducted by Feeding America, a hunger relief charity,

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The help is sought for various reasons, experts say: For active duty, pressures include low pay, poor financial planning by junior soldiers, the difficulty for spouses to hold steady jobs amid base transfers and deployments, and the higher costs of living in some states. For veterans, the triggers are the transition to the civilian world, and, for some, living off low disability pay or retirement funds. Both groups were hit by the Great Recession, too.

“We’ve heard for the last several years from our food banks that there’s a growing need among military families for food assistance,” said Maura Daly, a Feeding America spokeswoman.

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Spikes in food aid sought by active duty service members, reservists, guardsmen and veterans emerged in states with large military bases, like in Delaware, California, Texas, Colorado, Georgia, Washington and Virginia, according to Feeding America data from its "Hunger in America 2014" report, a national study it runs every four years. Other surges came in states where a lot of people join the military, like Iowa, and then return home after being discharged.

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Adding to the financial strain for military families, the Defense Department this year issued its lowest pay raise – 1 percent - in 50 years, according to the Military Officers Association of America, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on military personnel matters, and it will seek the same level from Congress through 2017.

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In interviews with veterans and active duty families, many told NBC they had various schemes for trying to stretch their dollars or raise extra cash: recycling, couponing, visiting multiple food pantries and homeless shelters for emergency food like milk for their children, buying groceries from dollar stores, delaying payment of utility bills, and signing up for food stamps and WIC – the nutrition program for women, infants and children. Some 2 percent of troops and 7 percent of veterans received food stamps from 2009 to 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Similar data for WIC wasn’t available.

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“It's hard to know that my husband is fighting for his country and he's working long days and long hours and we still have to struggle to keep food on the table and gas in our cars,” said Shirley Starkey, 45, whose husband, a Marine of 11 years and a sergeant, has been deployed twice to Afghanistan and once to Iraq. Starkey’s 18-year-old son left for Marine boot camp in May, but the couple is raising their six-year-old grandchild. They started having difficulty making ends meet when they moved from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina four years ago, where they had savings, to the more expensive northern San Diego County, where they can’t get ahead financially.

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The stories are similar for veterans, though they are typically wrestling with the switch to civilian life and, for many, living with disabilities. A 2012 survey of nearly 1,000 post 9/11-era veterans in Minnesota found that 27 percent were experiencing food insecurity, with about half of them in more dire straits. Both numbers were nearly double that of the national average, according to the survey by the University of Minnesota and the VA Health Care System in Minneapolis.

There had been no published research on food security among this group of veterans until the survey

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The food-insecure veterans had one or more of the following characteristics: they tended to be younger (like their active duty counterparts), have lower incomes, were unemployed, single and had more children at home than their peers who weren’t having food challenges.

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