The Coupon Goddess has again brought up a Reader Issue for debate. Go read about it HERE.
Basically it involves instituting Couponing Skills Courses for Food Stamp recipients.
If you've been a longtime reader of my blog, you'll remember that I partook in a Food Stamp Challenge back in June of this year. I spent that month exploring the issues surrounding Food Stamps as well as living off of an average full monthly allotment of snap benefits(food stamps)in my daily life.
You can search back in the archives of June 2010 to read up on what I talked about then and see how we did with that challenge.
So this issue is not something I haven't considered long and hard before. And over the intervening months I've continued to mull some of these same issues over in my own head.
Here is my very long response to this debate.....
Sluggy
"With great power comes great responsibility"--Peter Parker a.k.a. Spider-man
****
First off, I am older than dirt and have "been around" on this big blue ball many many years and seen a lot of human nature.
We are fascinating creatures, are we not?
Requiring 'courses' of some kind by social service agencies has been tried off and on over the years since the modern day food stamp program began a long time ago. Anything from mandated lessons on nutrition to shopping skills to cooking skills have been held. States are in charge of implementing, modifying & setting rules within a standard frame for their individual Food Stamp programs so nothing has been tried on a nationwide scale.
The result of all these courses overall?
Unless attendance was required to get the food benefit, most people in the program did NOT go. While I'm sure you have recipients with legit reasons why they couldn't attend, it is human nature to keep doing what you are doing and not step outside of your comfort zone and try new things. Most people are not motivated to make the effort it takes, even though they would reap many benefits in the life they lead from partaking of something like these courses. Some people would be against being told to attend from the word "go", since grown up people don't take kindly to being treated like a child and being told what to do is seen as condescending by many. Then the Food Stamp employees would be dealing with a whole lot of passive-aggressiveness on their part when dealing with these clients.
If efforts are made(and additional monies in the program's budget spent)on ideas that only a few take advantage of(like courses), those in charge end up discontinuing those services. Obviously, the courses are NOT cost-effective from an accounting standpoint. Also when budgets are cut if these kind of services are in place, they are the first thing to be cut(even if the clients utilize them),because the funds need to go for actual food benefits and spread out to cover the largest group of recipients it can.
It's sad really, that people as a whole don't take every advantage or help offered to them, and that we keep cycling through plans like this...start a course, have it met with indifference by the majority, discontinue that service and years later, after that service is forgotten have a new set of program directors try what is basically the same idea again. Sad and frustrating.
That being said....I do feel that these sort of nutrition/cooking skills/shopping skills courses ARE a good thing. And if it helps just one family break out of a cycle of poverty and/or diminished health, it was worth attempting.
I took part in a Food Stamp Challenge this past summer where I attempted to feed my family on the avg. monthly snap benefit amount those on full food stamp allotments receive. With my couponing/cooking/budgeting skills I was able to complete it fairly handily without altering the diet I fed my family much. If I had shopped/cooked like the average American, I doubt that I would have completed the task as handily.
As a part of this FS Challenge, I also researched the history of the program, the statistics, the shopping habits, the rules, and how to augment your scrip with other resources available to the general public and how to make frugal workarounds to stretch that money further. I talked to people in the grocery store who used snap benefits to get some 'real' feedback to my 'phony' poverty.
In all this I found that the majority of snap benefit recipients have NO CLUE that you CAN USE COUPONS WITH FOOD STAMPS!
I was floored to find this out frankly. The ones I talked to were equally surprised that they could combine the 2 forms of payment as well.
Now, I do see that using coupons if you are on food stamps is problematic, since if you are on food stamps, you are economically disadvantaged.
The majority of food stamp recipients don't have either extra money available or the resources to gather coupons. If you don't have enough money to buy food for your family, how can you justify spending money on multiple newspapers for the inserts or paying for a coupon clipping service to get coupons? Also, if money is tight, where do you get the cash for crazy expensive ink cartridges as well as paper to print out the coupons available online(if in fact, you have access to a computer WITH a printer)?
Here is what I would like to see happen. It would NOT require any additional monies in a state's food stamp budget to be spent on non-food stamp benefits NOR would it require any added payroll funds.
1-Have every social services employee who deals with the public in the FS program make each recipient of the benefits aware that coupons CAN be used with Food Stamps in payemnet at the stores. If handouts could be printed off at a small cost, then also give each recipient something in writing to take away when they come in to the agency.
Knowledge is power. Those who are pro-active in their lives will take that power and use it, I hope. ;-)
2-Somehow get manufacturer's to supply their coupons(for food products only) to food stamp recipients for free.
I don't know who this could be accomplished, but by putting the coupons in the hands of those using snap benefits you take away one more stumbling block to stretching your food scrip dollar further. I am sure that giving free coupons to the govt. agencies who handle the FS programs would be viewed as some how wrong(think companies using that 'in' supplying coupons directly to these consumers as a form of advertising and drumming up business and profits for those companies), perhaps some one can find a happy compromise that offends no one's sense of fair play. An independent clearing house to receive the free coupon supplies, in charge of distributing said coupons to those in need. I'm unclear on the actual 'how to' to get this accomplished.
3-While most govt. social service agencies are resistant to new ideas and people coming in off the street offering them help, try this at your local food bank or soup kitchen--a non-govt. entity. If you coupon and have the bent or ability to teach others, go to said private entity and offer to hold a couponing class free of charge to anyone who wants to attend. It may take some convincing but hopefully if you are persuasive and have a good argument for why it's a VERY good thing, and someone in charge will give you a chance to do something to help their clients outside of handing them a bag of food or a plate of hot food.
Or at the very least, approach these same independent entities about starting a Coupon Box at their location. This would just be some system(a box in a corner or something more elaborate if wanted/needed)where someone could get free-to-them coupons to use. Get a group together to donate coupons they won't or can't use to this effort. File the coupons by category and make it available at the food bank or soup kitchen, etc. so people can take what they need. It would just require getting the approval and setting this up initially and then once a month, someone would need to glean through and trash the out of date coupons, maintaining the system as it where. Low maintenance and BIG potential for rewards!
Now I am off to DO something to help someone here using my coupon smarts.
What can YOU do in your world to make a positive impact?
Sluggy
