County Board Finds Funding For Emergency Food Assistance

Grocery store shelves. Photo by Sophie Bolich.

The Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors voted to approve $150,000 in emergency funding for local SNAP recipients during the lapse in federal funding.

The federal Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program (SNAP) ran out of funding on Nov. 1 The was created to help low-income people purchase groceries. In Wisconsin the program is called FoodShare. The lapse in funding occurred as a result of the ongoing federal government shutdown and a deliberate refusal by President Donald Trump‘s administration to provide emergency funding in the interim.

Before the shutdown, nearly 700,000 Wisconsin residents a month were receiving assistance.

The county board resolution, authored by Chairwoman Marcelia Nicholson Bovell, pulls $150,000 from the county’s rainy day fund and provides it to the county Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) with instructions to “determine how to best allocate the funds for the purpose of providing emergency supplemental food assistance to County residents impacted by the reduction in SNAP benefits.” The department is to return to the board in spring to explain how it spent the funds.

The chairwoman noted the county board was stepping up to help county residents failed by higher levels of government.

“We feed them when others turn away. We lean in,” Nicholson Bovell said. “This resolution is about stepping up to the table where federal systems have failed to make sure no child or family goes hungry.”

Sup. Justin Bielinski noted the state of Wisconsin is projected to have a budget surplus, and that it has billions in a rainy day account.

“[the state Legislature] should have convened long ago to make sure that food assistance could continue, but they’re not doing it,” he said.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said in a statement he would support the board’s resolution, adding, “This is not a long-term solution. This is a drop in the bucket for what working families need right now.”

The county executive called on the president and congress to end the shutdown, provide food assistance and protect affordable healthcare. The county and the City of Milwaukee have partnered with NourishMKE and Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin on a countywide food drive for SNAP recipients.

Food Apartheid Declared a Public Health Emergency

The board also adopted another resolution sponsored by Nicholson Bovell and Sup. Anne O’Connor that declared “Food Apartheid” a public health crisis.

The supervisors developed the resolution based on input from the community, particularly the community organization Metcalfe Park Community Bridges.

“There is no grocery store within one to three miles [of Metcalfe Park], and more than half of our neighbors have lost their SNAP benefits, said Melody McCurtis, deputy director of Metcalfe Park Community Bridges. “That means that 1,000s of black families are struggling to feed their children, forced to travel across the city, often by foot or bus, just to access basic food and medicine.”

“Food Apartheid” is not intended to be symbolic rhetoric, McCurtis explained; rather, it describes how communities that lack access to healthy food are suffering from poor public policy.

O’Connor said the resolution “is keeping our eyes on the prize, focusing on policy.”

Nicholson Bovell said apartheid describes “a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race,” the chairwoman said. In Milwaukee, neighborhoods with unequal access to food have been made that way through segregation and racism, driving disinvestment, zoning laws and 20th-century policies like urban renewal, which bulldozed communities to make way for new infrastructure like freeways.

“When people can’t eat, they can’t thrive, and when a neighborhood goes hungry, the whole county suffers,” Nicholson Bovell said. “Declaring food apartheid a public health emergency is about naming the injustice and mobilizing action.”