NPR reported today on the scrutiny finger imaging of SNAP applicants is seeing by the Obama administration.  Listen to the audio here.

Fingerprinting For Food Stamps Under Scrutiny
by KAOMI GOETZ

Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approx. 9:00 a.m. ET
Transcript

December 18, 2009

The Obama administration may be trying to mount a case against digital finger-imaging of federal food assistance applicants, a practice four states are implementing in order to combat fraud.

Anti-hunger workers say it discriminates against the country’s poor and treats them like criminals when they are entitled to benefits.

New York City is one of the places that uses finger-imaging.

Angel Jean Seymore, a New York City resident, says she felt degraded when she had to give her digital fingerprint as part of her application to buy food under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). A severe back injury forced her to stop working as a home health aide.

“They treated me in a disgusting way. They did not care that I had a disability,” says Seymore. “I’m a U.S. citizen, born and raised in the Bronx all my life. I have my identity in the health department and Social Security. And yet I’m being treated like a criminal.”

If she lived elsewhere in the state, it wouldn’t have happened. That’s because the rest of the state has opted out of the finger-imaging requirement. Advocates who work with many of the city’s poor are frustrated.

“It’s as if the mayor is saying his own constituents are more criminal,” says Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

Berg says finger-imaging discriminates against people who can’t physically come to an office to have it done, either because of work or disabilities. People often feel like it’s a tracking system or they’ve done something wrong. And he says there are other ways to detect fraud, such as computer matching with Social Security numbers.

“There’s only one kind of fraud potentially captured by finger-imaging. That’s when a person actually creates a duplicate identity, like they’re in James Bond. It’s preposterous,” says Berg. “It’s hard enough for an eligible person on the program to get the benefits.”

An Urban Institute study found that finger-imaging deterred 4 percent from completing their application. Critics say that’s tens of thousands of people. But New York City counters that the practice has been one of the best weapons against fraud over the past decade.

Robert Doar, commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration, has not seen the study, but he says people aren’t being discouraged from applying. He points to the nearly 300,000 more New Yorkers who received SNAP benefits in the past year.

“It’s not an ink process, like what would take place in some criminal justice situation. It’s easy, it’s simple and fast, and the numbers prove our point,” Doar says.

Yet it puts New York City at odds with most of the rest of the country. Just three other states — Texas, California and Arizona — also use finger-imaging. But a few weeks ago, Agriculture Department Undersecretary Kevin Concannon was in New York City, where he said the practice is under scrutiny.

“We are examining that whole question of the efficacy of it. Does it really do what it’s alleged to do? My biggest concern: Does it have an unintended consequence of dissuading people from coming forward who need the benefits?”

Concannon added that if a state wanted to start the finger-imaging today, the Obama administration wouldn’t approve it. Anti-hunger workers say they’re hopeful a rollback is coming. After all, they say, President Obama is the first president to have grown up in a household where food stamps meant food on the table.

Palms for Life Fund is sponsoring a film contest next Monday, December 21st.   Six short films depicting hunger in local communities will be shown followed by an awards ceremony for the three winners.  Joel Berg will be one of the judges for the event.

Where: Action Center to End World Hunger
6, River Terrace
Battery Park City – New York, NY 10282

When: Monday, December 21st, 3-5 PM.

RSVP by December 17, 2009 to rsvp@facesofhunger.org (space is limited) or call 718.450.0123.

Visit the website at facesofhunger.org.

Last month the Coalition Against Hunger released our Annual Hunger Survey Report.  To gather information for the report we surveyed nearly 300 soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City, asking about the demand they have seen over the past year.  City-wide, responding agencies saw an 20.8 percent increase in demand.

However, it wasn’t all bad news.  Even with the worsening economy and more people seeking help at food pantries and soup kitchens, these agencies were better able to meet the need.  Thanks to increased government funding through the federal stimulus package, the number of responding agencies who did not have enough food to meet their demand dropped from 69% in 2008 to 55% this year.

Increased government funding to SNAP (formerly food stamps) also helped to feed the increasing number of hungry New Yorkers.

Although there was an increase in people needing food over the past year, extra government funding has kept people afloat in these hard times.

The Food Retail Expansion to Support Health, or FRESH, program was approved by city council last week.  The program provides financial and zoning incentives to grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods in all five boroughs.

In addition to passing the FRESH initiative, City Council Speaker Quinn announced her FoodWorks New York initiative, a long term plan for food policy in the city.  Read about the initiative here:

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, is to unveil a long-term plan on food policy on Monday, a plan she says goes beyond the issues of trans fats and sugary sodas to address the production, transportation and sales of food in New York City.

Her initiative, called FoodWorks New York, is meant to build on the efforts of the Bloomberg’s administration’s food policy coordinator, Benjamin Thomases, whose office improves access to food for low-income New Yorkers. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg first established the food policy coordinator’s office in 2007.

The NYTimes recently published an article with a new view on charity to anti-hunger organizations: money can go farther than cans. As great as it feels to drop a few cans into a bin covered in wrapping paper, giving money–even just a few dollars–is more helpful to food pantries.

Donated money allows pantries and kitchens to buy wholesale food for a cheaper price than you’d see at a grocery store.

At the Food Bank, $50 could buy 200 boxes of cereal, Pastor Kansfield explained, as opposed to perhaps the 10 that donors to food drives could get for that much. She is moved by the generosity, the can-do impulse that propels local food drives, but is overwhelmed, as would be most small nonprofits, by the logistics.

Donated money also allows pantries and kitchens to buy much needed non-food supplies such as rubber gloves or garbage bags.  These types of items are often not covered by many of the grants available to emergency food providers, yet without them pantries and kitchens wouldn’t be able to do their work.

Joel Berg also urges people to give money instead of canned food.  He points out that it’s not just food pantries that are fighting hunger.

Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, also encourages people to give money, not cans — and not just to organizations that distribute food, but to those that do outreach to enroll people who qualify for food stamps, or to those that advocate more aggressively at the policy level to solve the problem of hunger.

To make more of a difference, leave the cans on the shelf and instead donate that money.

This holiday season we note the sobering reality that more than 49 million Americans live in households that can’t afford enough food. Locally, according to a new study by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, there was a 21% jump this year in people forced to use food pantries and soup kitchens.

Soaring unemployment and underemployment are exacerbating the problem.

Even worse, many New Yorkers also live in “food deserts” – neighborhoods in which, even if they could afford them, the healthiest foods are scarce or non-existent. These areas also tend to lack living-wage jobs.

For instance, in the 16th Congressional District in the South Bronx, from 2005 through 2007, the official unemployment rate was 13.9 percent, and 35 percent of able-bodied adults remained outside of the workforce. Bronx Community Board District One had a poverty rate of 45 percent – and did not contain a single supermarket of 2,500 square feet or more. Yet convenience stores, bodegas, and fast food restaurants were plentiful. In the 10451 zip code there were three McDonald’s. It’s no wonder that hunger and obesity are flip sides of the same malnutrition coin.

To tackle our interconnected food, nutrition, and poverty crises, the federal government should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative.

Modeled after the “green jobs” concept, “Good Food, Good Jobs” would create jobs through projects and businesses that bring healthier food to low-income areas. Food and job deserts could become new oases of economic recovery and healthy living.  I detail my proposal in a new paper published today by the Progressive Policy Institute:  http://www.progressivefix.com/joel-berg-good-food-good-jobs

This effort should build upon the burgeoning community food security movement, which is strengthening regional food connections with projects that are effective, but are currently far too small-scale to feed the masses.  My home borough of Brooklyn, New York is a hotbed of such activism, with numerous food-related businesses and projects – ranging from fish farm experiments in a basement of Brooklyn College to a company trying to entice landowners to allow others to garden on their land in exchange for a cut of the produce grown and cash collected.

Citywide in New York, the Speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, has just launched a visionary Food Works plan to help further build upon such efforts: http://council.nyc.gov/html/releases/foodworks_12_7_09.shtml

The federal initiative I am proposing should begin by increasing funding for food systems projects of proven effectiveness, such as community and rooftop gardens, urban farms, food co-ops, farm stands, community supported agriculture (CSA) projects, and farmers’ markets. Other important policies should include: expanding community kitchens that combine rescuing excess food with training people in food-service jobs; helping new supermarkets locate in low-income areas and existing supermarkets thrive; and hiring unemployed youth to grow, market, sell, and deliver nutritious foods, while teaching them entrepreneurship skills.

The initiative should also take bold new steps. It should provide wage and even commuting subsidies to help current U.S. residents find living-wage work at regional and local farms, reducing the impetus for growers to exploit immigrant farm laborers. Since there is far more profit in processing food than in growing it, the initiative should focus on supporting food businesses that add value year-round, such as neighborhood food processing plants; businesses that turn produce into ready-to-eat salads and sandwiches; healthy vending-machine companies; and affordable and nutritious restaurants and caterers.

In contrast to making inconvenience a virtue in food preparation, this initiative should help working families by creating new types of ready-to-eat or easy-to-prepare foods that are nutritious, sustainable, and convenient. It should also support the construction and maintenance of community exercise and nutrition education centers, which would provide free or low-cost services to low-income community members, and subsidize those activities by charging more for higher-income families. And given the growing concerns over the world’s fisheries, it should also provide a significant investment into the research and development of environmentally sustainable urban fish-production facilities.

The Obama Administration should forge a partnership with state, local, and tribal governments, nonprofits, and the private sector to scale up such projects. Just as the federal recovery bill invested in the idea of “green jobs,” a new “food jobs” agenda could spur not just economic stimulus but fight hunger, cut obesity, improve nutrition, and help reduce health costs.

The President, the First Lady, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have pledged to end U.S. child hunger by 2015 while also tackling obesity. Those objectives, combined with the need to jumpstart the still sluggish jobs market, make a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative a promising idea. In the best-case scenario, it could create large numbers of living-wage jobs in self-sustaining businesses even as it addresses our food, health, and nutrition problems. But even in the worst case, it would create short-term subsidized jobs that would provide an economic stimulus, and at least give low-income consumers the choice to obtain more nutritious foods – a choice so often denied to them.

Advocates Applaud NYC Efforts and Encourage More Progress;
Call for Federal Government to Pass Strong Child Nutrition Bill

Despite the significant progress that New York City public schools achieved by making universal school breakfast available to all students regardless of family income, New York City has the second lowest participation rate out of 25 large American cities, and most cities lag significantly in program participation, according to a new report by the national anti-hunger group, the Food Research Action Center (FRAC) titled “School Breakfast in America’s Big Cities.” {Report available at: www.frac.org.}

An initiative started by the Bloomberg Administration to adopt universal school breakfast and to allow some children to eat breakfast in their classrooms has helped to increase breakfast participation in New York City. Currently, the New York City Department of Education Office of SchoolFood program serves 160,000 school breakfasts a day and in-classroom breakfast programs have expanded to 139 classrooms.

Still, according to the FRAC study, 67.5 percent of low-income public school students in New York fail to receive them. Only 32.5 percent of the city’s children who obtain school lunches obtain school breakfasts, compared to 59.2 percent in Pittsburgh, 95.7 percent in Newark, 62.6 percent in Boston, and 55.1 percent in Los Angeles. The report indicates that the districts with higher participation rates tend to make breakfast available in classrooms more frequently than does New York City, where most children must still face the stigma of going to a separate lunchroom to eat breakfast. However, a main theme of the report is the lagging participation in all the cities, with 22 of the 25 cities providing breakfast to fewer than 60% of the students receiving lunch.

“The Bloomberg Administration and the Department of Education (DOE) Office of SchoolFood have made valiant efforts to increase school breakfast participation in the city,” said Executive Director Joel Berg, New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Serving universal breakfast and expanding the current pilot program for in-classroom breakfasts was an excellent initiative. Unfortunately, the data in this report shows that virtually all the nation’s big cities have ample work to do to catch up with the growing need for good nutrition among low-income students. This report is good motivation to work harder to incorporate in-classroom breakfasts in more schools.”

The report calculated that if New York City increased the percentage of children who receive lunch and who also receive breakfast from the current rate of 32.5 percent to a rate of 70 percent, the school system would have an additional $47.6 million in federal funding per year and be able to feed an additional 191,484 low-income students.

Continued Berg, “Increasing breakfast participation will boost test scores and improve child health and well-being, and it would also bring significant federal dollars into the city. For all those reasons, DOE, parents, educational unions, elected officials, and advocates all must make it a top priority to work together to raise breakfast participation levels. Moreover, this report shows that under-participation in the breakfast program is a national problem. To allow New York and other cities to provide more in-classroom breakfasts, President Obama and Congress should work together immediately to pass—and fully fund – a federal Child Nutrition Reauthorization Bill that would support universal in-classroom school breakfasts.”

Studies have shown that students tend to perform better when they eat breakfast.  Although all students in New York City are offered a free breakfast at school, participation rates are generally low.  In an attempt to get more kids to eat breakfast, New York City schools began serving breakfast to students in their classrooms.  The small pilot program has been slowly expanding throughout the city.  Last week, the United Federation of Teachers published a story about the success the program has seen in its publication New York Teacher.

Breakfast in the Classroom a hit

by Dorothy Callaci

Nov 26, 2009 1:47 PM

Starting the day right

More and more city school children are enjoying a “snap, crackle and pop” start to their school day as the Breakfast in the Classroom campaign picks up speed.

At schools like PS 102 and PS 146 in East Harlem, and 145 other schools citywide,  the day begins in every classroom with a free breakfast of juice or fruit, cereal, milk, a bread item such as a bagel, roll or muffin, or a dairy item such as yogurt or cheese.

PS 102 teacher Rosalind Orman called the program “a wonderful way to begin the day” as she distributed a breakfast bag to each of her 1st- and 2nd-graders. “Eating like a family brings a peacefulness and grounds them,” she said, “and it establishes good health patterns.”

In the gym of the pre-K-5 school, PTA President Jeanette Irizarry watched as teachers handed out the breakfasts from large insulated bags assigned to each class before heading for their classrooms. She applauded the program as “a healthy start to the day and a chance for students to have time together.”

The Department of Education, in conjunction with the Department of Health, introduced Breakfast in the Classroom as a pilot program in January 2008 with plans to expand the program to 300 more schools. It is part of DOH efforts to address health disparities in high-need neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma and obesity.

It has been catching on quickly. A year ago, PS 146 started the program in two classes that expanded to 18 by June and is now a flourishing schoolwide program.

It has been catching on quickly. A year ago, PS 146 started the program in two classes that expanded to 18 by June and is now a flourishing schoolwide program.

The free breakfast campaign is based on scientific research that links children’s nutrition with improved academic performance and psychological well-being. Studies of students who regularly eat breakfast in their classrooms indicate improved attendance, punctuality and behavior, as well as improved cognitive function, attention, memory and achievement on standardized tests. In addition, the program may also reduce obesity, a serious health issue among children in the country today.

Carol Harrison, UFT District 9 representative, reported that district representatives in the Bronx are working to bring the breakfast program into all their schools and are meeting with the UFT, the DOE and the DOH to make it happen.

UFT Health and Safety Associate Lisa Lau credits the flexibility of the breakfast program with its success. Working with a “breakfast team” that should include an administrator, cafeteria manager, custodian, parent coordinator and chapter leader, each school develops its own rules for how the program works, including distribution of the breakfasts that are packed in insulated transporter bags, labeled for each classroom and delivered daily, as well as classroom management during the breakfast period.

SchoolFood, which serves 19,672 free breakfasts daily, supports menu flexibility to accommodate such issues as student allergies or teacher objections to having students peeling fruits like oranges.

At PS 102, 2nd-grade teacher Aliza Trujillo prefers the “grab and go” system, which means she meets her class in the gym, hands out breakfast packages and then proceeds with her class to their room. She uses the 10-minute breakfast period to “ease into the day.”

“The children can’t handle notebooks while eating,” she said. “They work hard all day so they don’t need to be doing other things.”

Trujillo noted that last year there were always a few late and hungry students — “I couldn’t bear to have them not eat” — for whom she kept snacks. But then the rest of the class wanted the snacks, too.

In other classrooms at PS 102, students ate breakfast listening to stories, or music or while working on a math problem. It’s the teacher’s choice.

The UFT has joined the DOH in promoting the Breakfast in the Classroom campaign. If your school wants to participate, or for more information, contact Lisa Lau at 1-212-598-7763. More information is also available online at http://www.opt-osfns.org. Click School Food and then Breakfast in the Classroom.

Find the article here.

The New York Times recently ran a piece about soaring food stamp use in America.  People who never before thought they would need to use government benefits like food stamps are finding themselves without jobs and without money to buy food.  In these tight times more than 36  million Americans are using food stamps to buy their groceries.

With food stamp use seeing record highs, you might think the stigma about food stamps has faded.  And for many people, it has.  But there are still many misconceptions about food stamp benefits and the people who receive them.  Gawker took the time to scour the comments section to gauge the reaction of readers.  Here’s what they found:

The Disconcerting Reality of Food Stamp America

America’s food stamp welfare program is now feeding one in eight Americans, and almost one in every four children. This is terrifying for a number of reasons, the least among them being “everyone’s poor.”

The New York Times ran a big, beautiful piece today profiling the program and its newest recipients. To call this a “touchy” subject would be a gross understatement.

The numbers inspire fear and rage from pretty much every direction: left, right, or having fallen under them. They’re also slightly terrifying due in no small part to the sufficiently irrational discourse held over it. The heavily moderated New York Times‘ comments section offers plenty of choice selections, so imagine what they turned away. Many of them echo this sentiment:

Honestly I find this frightening. This is not a positive thing, this is a broken system. And hello welfare mommies and daddies, I know it’s harsh, but please consider quality v. quantity when “planning” your family.

Continue reading here.

As hunger is increasing, more and more people are needing help to feed their families and themselves.  In these times of crisis, the number of people relying on SNAP benefits to buy food has increased.  In New York City and three other states SNAP applicants are required to have a finger imaged taken before receiving benefits.  Representative Weiner and 27 members of Congress from the four areas still requiring finger-imaging have come together to ask USDA Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vislack to end the practice.

Washington, DC – Following reports that more New Yorkers went hungry in 2008 than the year before, Representative Anthony Weiner (D – Brooklyn and Queens), a member of the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee and 27 Members of Congress called on Agriculture Secretary Vilsack to end the practice of fingerprinting food stamp applicants.

New York, Texas, California and Arizona require fingerprinting for all new food stamp applicants. Despite claims that this protects against fraud and duplicative benefits, according to the most recent USDA data, payment errors were actually higher in the 4 states that fingerprint. Meanwhile, participation rates for all eligible people in those states that fingerprint were lower. In addition, fingerprinting deters many people in need from applying. According to a March 2007 report by the Urban Institute, fingerprinting led to a 4.3% reduction in food stamp applicants because of the stigma associated with such a practice.

In a letter to Secretary Vilsack, Representatives Anthony Weiner (D-NY), Charles Rangel (D-NY), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Jose Serrano (D-NY), Joseph Crowley (D-NY), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Gary Ackerman (D-NY), Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Bob Filner (D-CA), Ed Pastor (D-AZ), Diane Watson (D-CA), Al Green (D-TX), Pete Stark (D-CA), Grace Napolitano (D-CA), Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX), Sam Farr (D-TX), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Charles Gonzalez (D-TX), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), George Miller (D-CA), Solomon Ortiz (D-TX), Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Michael Honda (D-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Gene Green (D-TX), Howard Berman (D-CA) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) wrote: “Eliminating finger imaging would remove significant barriers for residents of these states who need help feeding themselves and their families, which is particularly important during these economic times.”

View the article and the letter.