Finances were already looking tight for Jade Grant and her three children as she entered the final months of the year.
“Everyone’s birthdays are in a row,” the 32-year-old certified nursing assistant said. “You’ve got the holidays coming up. You’ve got Thanksgiving. Everything’s great. And then, boom. No (food) stamps.”
Grant is among the nearly 42 million low-income Americans who get help with grocery shopping from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. When the federal shutdown began in October, she wasn’t worried about losing her benefits — she said she was used to the government’s “crap.”
But conditions became precarious as the budget impasse entered its second month and President Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of freezing SNAP payments for November. With one child eating gluten-free and another with several allergies, specialty items have already increased her grocery bill. Now Grant wondered how she would put food on the table — especially with her youngest’s sixth birthday approaching.
Grant then logged into Propel, an app used by 5 million people to manage their electronic benefits transfers, where she saw a pop-up banner inviting her to apply for a relief program. Within a minute I completed the survey, and about two days later I received a $50 virtual gift card.
The total didn’t come close to her monthly SNAP benefits. But one Palm Bay, Florida, resident said it’s enough to buy a custom car. bluish Birthday cake for her son.
Nearly a quarter of a million families received the same amount of cash from the nonprofit GiveDirectly, missing out on SNAP deposits that many needed to feed their families. The collaboration with Propel has proven to be the largest disaster response in ICG’s history outside of COVID-19; Non-pandemic records were set, with $12 million raised, more than 246,000 recipients registered and 5,000 individual donors reached.
Recipients are still recovering from uncertainty over SNAP delays last month. Company surveys indicate that many are dealing with the long-term consequences of borrowing money in early November when their benefits didn’t arrive on time, according to Propel CEO Jamie Chin. At a time when users felt the current safety net had collapsed, they credited fast payments with supporting them – financially and emotionally.
“It’s not a lot,” Grant said. “But it’s a lot at the same time.” “Because $50 can do a lot when you don’t have anything.”
It’s not the first partnership for a for-profit, non-profit software company. They have previously combined GiveDirectly’s quick cash model with Propel’s verified user base to get funds to survivors of natural disasters – including $1,000 last year for some affected families Due to Hurricanes Milton and Helen.
“We saw this particular incident with the shutdown as more of a natural disaster in the sense that it created a really sudden and severe form of hardship for many Americans across the country,” Chen said.
The scope was different this time. The “man-made disaster,” in the words of GiveDirectly US director Dustin Palmer, was not geographically isolated. The benefits freeze has affected more people than they normally serve. SNAP costs nearly $10 billion a month, so they never expected to raise enough money to completely replace the delayed benefits, Palmer said.
But 5,000 individual donors — plus $1 million in gifts from Propel and the New York nonprofit Robin Hood Foundation, as well as support from other major foundations — gave a significant sum. Palmer found that the case had more resonance than he expected.
GiveDirectly reports that the average donation was $100. Palmer took this response as a sign that the issue was now close for many Americans.
“You and I know SNAP recipients. We may have been SNAP recipients,” Palmer said. “So this wasn’t a disaster in Central Texas where I’ve never been before, but it was a disaster in our communities.”
The bigger question was about the total amount of each cash transfer. Should they reach more people with fewer dollars or vice versa? For example, Los Angeles wildfire survivors received $3,500 each from a campaign similar to GiveDirectly. But that is because they wanted to save enough to cover a month’s accommodation and transit costs for those who lost their homes.
They settled on $50 because Palmer said they wanted a “stopgap” that represented a “meaningful trip to the grocery store.” To focus their limited resources fairly on the people who will miss the most support, Palmer said they targeted families with children who receive the maximum SNAP benefits. Propel allowed them to send money once the app detected that the family’s benefits had not arrived at the usual time of the month.
Recipients decide whether their prepaid debit cards arrive physically, which could allow them to withdraw cash from an ATM, or virtually, which can be used almost immediately. Usually the split is fairly even, according to Palmer, but this time more than 90% of recipients chose the default option.
“To me, this speaks to the speed of people and their needs,” Palmer said. “I just say, ‘Oh yeah, I just need food today. “I don’t want to wait to mail it.”
Diana Tompkins relies on her SNAP credit to feed her toddler and 8-year-old.
“Honestly, I watch him like a hawk,” she said.
But she said she went into “panic mode” when she missed a $976 deposit last month. She’s a gig worker, completing DoorDash and Uber Eats orders when she finds the time.
Her pantry is always stocked with non-perishable items — canned goods, pastas, sauces — in case her unreliable truck stops working and she can’t get to the store. But they can’t risk running out of money as uncertainty remains over the length of the shutdown and future SNAP payments.
She said the $50 from GiveDirectly bought her milk and bread — not a lot but “a big help.” Her local food pantries in DeMott, Indiana, have proven inconsistent. One week they served much more than expected, but the next week they were “so busy” that the place wasn’t worth a visit, she said.
She said it was “scary” that the government “could decide not to feed so many people.”
“At least I have my safety net, but not everyone is so lucky,” she said. “I’ve never trusted the government, and this is just another powerful reason why I don’t.”
Chen, Propel’s CEO, said research conducted by his company suggests that the November freeze damaged many beneficiaries’ trust in the government. Even with SNAP funded through the next fiscal year, many participants are concerned about another shutdown, Chen said.
“It has now brought a seed of doubt to people that this basic thing they use to pay for food may not be there when they need it,” Chen said.
The gap remains for many. Propel estimates that just over half of SNAP recipients received their benefits late last month. GiveDirectly has launched an additional “purge” campaign to distribute retroactive cash to more than 8,000 people still suffering.
The delay disrupted Grant’s fiscal balancing act. She deferred her electric bill and car insurance.
She said: “The government is closing its doors and this causes everything to completely stop.”
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