City Fare, Food Bank receive $50k grants to grow senior SNAP recipients

Michelle Hudyma, one of Food Bank of Delaware’s SNAP Outreach Coordinators, distributes fresh food.

WILMINGTON — City Fare Meals on Wheels and the Food Bank of Delaware have each received $50,000 grants from the National Council on Aging (NCOA), which hopes to enroll 20,000 eligible older adults in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) across 13 states.

The Food Bank’s strategy for the SNAP grant

The Food Bank’s grant will support its ongoing SNAP outreach efforts, using the money to support its Commodity Supplemental Food Program, reaching out to seniors over 60.

“We will likely do some robocalling and also send out outreach coordinators to more senior living facilities, senior centers, and other community-based senior organizations,” said Kim Turner, director of communications for the Food Bank of Delaware, which has locations in Newark and Milford.

“We spend a lot of time on SNAP outreach in the community, signing people up for different state benefits, helping them navigate the system, and helping them apply for benefits.”

Seniors have the largest enrollment gap for SNAP benefits in Delaware at approximately 67 percent, or an estimated 20,000 seniors, Turner said.

Turner said seniors are typically under-represented in applying for SNAP for reasons that include feeling it’s not worth their while because they may get as little as $23 depending on their income, assets, and size of their households, and for pride issues after working their entire lives.

“Besides their social security checks, older people living on low budgets cut their medications,” Turner said. “They need to eat, and we don’t want them to feel embarrassed about reaching out. This population gets other calls from us, and we want to build a relationship with them. Robocalls are one component, and we’re working to make sure they know it’s us calling when we use that strategy.”

City Fare’s strategy for the SNAP grant

City Fare Meals on Wheels will use its $50,000 to train and pay people for outreach to prospective SNAP enrollees, to conduct initial screening, and to create leave-behinds for prospects to review, said Erica Porter Brown, project director for City Fare since 2001.

City Fare Meals on Wheels is a program of St. Anthony’s Community Center that has operated in Wilmington since 1986. City Fare provides hot, nourishing meals to homebound elderly and disabled persons in New Castle County who cannot prepare meals for themselves and have no one to do so for them. It also provides professional case management to every client.

Brown said City Fare hopes to add 650 clients to the SNAP program over the next 16 months. Since receiving notification of the grant last month, they’ve been training people and testing their approach before the full rollout in January.

“We’ve doing nutrition programs for older adults and are just getting started with SNAP outreach,” she said. “It’s a natural extension of what we’re doing with the population, one more service we can offer.”

NCOA’s goals for the program

NCOA is making a total of $1.3 million in grants through its SNAP Enrollment Initiative, funded by The Walmart Foundation.

Grantees have 18 months to increase enrollments in their communities and enroll 20,000 older adults in SNAP nationwide. This is part of NCOA’s national effort to support community-based organizations and agencies in assisting older adults in applying for and enrolling in SNAP.

In 2022, nearly 7 million older Americans were food insecure, and research shows this number could rise to 9 million by 2050. SNAP helps older adults ensure better nutrition, which improves health outcomes.

Delaware is among the states where less than 12 percent of households with adults 60 and older are enrolled in SNAP.

In addition to finding and enrolling older adults in SNAP, City Fare and the Food Bank will follow up with clients to ensure they received the benefits and see what barriers delayed or prevented enrollment. This will help NCOA improve the customer experience to attract, engage, and connect older adults to SNAP.