(C) Common Dreams
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SUN Bucks Earns Wide Bipartisan Support as a Solution for Families Facing Summer Food Insecurity [1]
['Lew Blank']
Date: 2024-06-27
By Grace Adcox and Matthew Cortland
For far too many families, summer brings the stress of nutrition insecurity, as parents and guardians whose children had access to healthy breakfasts and lunches at their schools must grapple with the question of how to afford feeding them throughout the summer.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) developed the SUN Bucks program in order to help families answer these questions, by providing supplementary grocery benefits to support low-income families in paying for these summer food costs. Data for Progress recently conducted a survey of national voters to understand perceptions of childhood hunger and gauge knowledge of, and attitudes toward, the national SUN Bucks program.
Many programs addressing food insecurity are already familiar to national likely voters, with awareness highest for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which 39% of voters say they have heard “a lot” about, followed by 39% who’ve heard “a little.” Other nationwide programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the National School Lunch Program or School Breakfast Program also have generally high recognition, with 72% and 70% of respondents indicating they’ve heard at least a little about each program, respectively.
In contrast, SUN Bucks, formerly known as Summer EBT, has relatively low name recognition. Nearly 7 in 10 voters say they have heard “nothing at all” about the program, while only 11% say they’ve heard “a lot” about this policy.
While food insecurity for U.S. households with children declined over the 2010s in the recovery period following the Great Recession, the USDA reports notable spikes in childhood hunger rates during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly between 2021 and 2022. Based on their own knowledge, a plurality of voters (43%) believe rates of childhood hunger in the U.S. have worsened over the past several years, followed by 3 in 10 voters who think they have remained the same. Starkly, only 15% of voters believe that rates of childhood hunger have improved over the past several years. Parents and guardians of children are somewhat more optimistic, as only 35% believe that childhood hunger has worsened in recent years, while nearly half of respondents who self-identify as disabled (48%) think childhood hunger rates have worsened.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/6/27/sun-bucks-earns-wide-bipartisan-support-as-a-solution-for-families-facing-summer-food-insecurity
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