By 
Yolanda Johnson can’t remember a time in her adult life when going to the grocery store didn’t make her feel a little bit uncomfortable.
Whether it’s because of the items she’s buying or the way she’s paying for them, sometimes cashiers will ask her too many questions or give her looks that feel judgmental, as if they’re questioning why she’s using government benefits to pay for certain foods.
“Sometimes it would just cause me to not even just get anything at the store and go to a different store,” explained Johnson.
In Michigan, residents who qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) receive their benefits on an orange debit card labeled “Bridge Card,” making it obvious when someone is using food assistance to pay for their groceries.
Johnson’s experiences are reflected in the Feeding MI Families report, which surveyed nearly 1,300 households to understand Michiganders’ personal encounters with food insecurity and food assistance.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, food insecurity has continued to rise, even with the temporary expansions of assistance over the past few years. Johnson says she’s also felt the pinch of increasing prices when she visits the grocery store to buy food for herself and her household’s four young kids.
“Things are more expensive than ever,” she said. “And the money I get for food doesn’t end up paying for everything me and my children need.”
She is one of more than 1 million Michigan residents who depend on SNAP for healthy, affordable and nutritious food. For years, she has received various benefits from the state, including the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) program, which provides supplemental nutrition for pregnant and breastfeeding individuals, as well as infants and young children.
The stigma of using public assistance is something she had to learn to navigate early on.
“There is always some uneasy feeling with using public resources just because there’s this belief that it’s for those who can’t really afford things, even though that may not necessarily be how people receiving the benefits may feel about it,” said Johnson.
Photos by: Isabel Lopez Slattery
The Feeding MI Families project was, in part, born out of the tension between those who administer food assistance programs and those who rely on food benefits.
“During the pandemic, we heard frustration on programs’ parts about people turning down food or throwing away food,” said Kate Bauer, project director of Feeding MI Families. ”But at the same time, families were reporting that they didn’t have enough food to eat. There seemed to be a disconnect between what programs were able to offer and how parents wanted to feed their children.”
The project aimed to learn from families across the state and develop family-driven recommendations for creating more equitable nutrition assistance programs in Michigan.
“We specifically asked parents about discrimination and stigma related to the use of these food assistance programs because early on in project planning with parents, we had heard these factors named as one of the primary barriers to people fully using the food assistance that’s available to them,” said Bauer.
Funded in part by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), the project was able to meaningfully engage with families, partly due to the compensation they received for their time spent talking with Bauer’s team.
“We opened this up to people who self-identified as parents and used a text messaging platform to connect with them. Through texting, parents provided us unbelievable detail about their experiences and their ideas of what they want,” Bauer said.
What the responses told her was that parents experiencing food insecurity care a lot about the programs they participate in and want to make them better.
Bauer, who is a behavioral epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, said she had never experienced so much engagement in a community-based project.
“Usually, when you do a survey online it’s like pulling teeth to get people to respond, but through this text messaging platform, we were really able to connect with parents,” she added.
The study heard feedback about people’s experiences shopping for food with food assistance, accessing food pantries, and how Michigan’s requirements to receive food assistance can become a barrier for those who need help to receive it. For example, a parent’s involvement with the state office of child support may decrease the amount of food assistance a person receives.
“Right now in Michigan, if you apply for food stamps and there’s another parent in the picture who should be providing child support but isn’t registered with the Office of Child Support, the state will decrease the amount of food stamps your family receives,” explained Bauer.
Families consistently told researchers that the amount of funds they receive through SNAP is not enough to make ends meet.
“Parents shared over and over that they would like to see modifications to what expenses they are able to deduct from their gross income to determine their benefit amount. Adjusting the allowed deductions to more accurately reflect housing, transportation and health expenses, for example, would provide families with greater benefits, which are desperately needed,” the report stated.
Bauer says many parents also want to shop for fresh food products at their local grocery stores versus larger chain stores further away. She heard from a mother who would drive around to multiple stores looking for fresh food at an affordable price.
“She doesn’t want to spend the only time she has with her kids, driving store to store, you know, an hour in each direction. She wants to be able to go to her local store, she wants to be able to buy local produce,” Bauer added.
For WKKF Senior Program Officer Marijata Daniel-Echols, the experiences shared in the report underscore the importance of universal access to food assistance benefits.
“We want a system where everyone has the basics that they need, and once you start moving in that direction, then some of that stigma goes away, because everybody needs vegetables,” she explained. “Everybody gets vegetables, then we’re not making a judgment call on whether or not you’re good enough to get the vegetables.”
Such a system would be similar to how schools across Michigan now offer free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of how much their families earn.
“There’s no child that’s hungry because they can’t afford food and are embarrassed to get the free and reduced lunch. There’s none of that anymore; everybody’s the same,” she said.
It wasn’t surprising for Daniel-Echols to learn how shame and stigma consistently showed up in people’s experiences accessing food benefits. She points to the way our society frames needs as personal failures instead of systemic failures.
“Parents are frequently the target of stigmatizing interactions when shopping with their Bridge Cards. Improvements in staff training; flexibility to pay with EBT (electronic benefits transfer card) through self-checkout, online and “pay while you shop” options; and a more discreet design for the Bridge Card would all improve families’ shopping experience,” states the report.
Daniel-Echols underscores the report’s distinctive strength: its solutions are rooted in the firsthand knowledge of people who have benefited from or encountered challenges with food assistance.
“If you trust people, they can give you actionable solutions now,” she said. “Their solutions and ideas need to be coupled with resources and power and access.”
As Feeding MI Families looks to the future, the team takes pride in how the project centered everyday Michiganders striving to improve their lives and those of their families. They hope their findings will drive policy changes statewide, so that families seeking assistance no longer feel embarrassed or judged.
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