On: November 25, 2025

For days if not weeks this month, low-income folks and families who rely on government services like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to feed themselves and their families have gone without the benefits they need.

Since the shutdown started on October 1, uncertainty surrounded whether or not SNAP recipients would receive their monthly benefits which average $187.20 per participant come November. In lieu of the government fulfilling its obligations to its citizens, individuals and organizations in communities across the country stepped up to care for each other by filling the looming SNAP Gap with monetary donations, food drives and donations, volunteering, and more.

But the real SNAP Gap has been a persistent, decades-long problem that isn’t going to go away now that the shutdown is over.

There’s long been a yawning gap between those who qualify for SNAP benefits and those who are enrolled in the program and thus receiving them. Contrary to the thoroughly debunked yet stubborn myth that government programs are filled with undeserving recipients leeching off publicly funded welfare, during the 2022 fiscal year the USDA program served 88% of eligible individuals—SNAP’s highest participation rate across its more than 50-year history for which data is available.

While this 12% SNAP Gap is an improvement from the program’s 18% gap in 2018, the problem is that a discrepancy between those who qualify for benefits and those who receive them exists at all. While the 42 million Americans currently receiving SNAP benefits have been a hot topic in the news cycle lately, the many millions of those who qualify but don’t receive SNAP benefits continue to be overlooked.

Reasons for the gap are multifarious. They range from a lack of awareness of the program in the first place to a lingering stigma surrounding the acceptance of government assistance and assumptions of ineligibility. Regardless of the reason, single mothers and their children are disproportionately impacted by the real SNAP Gap. Children in single-parent families make up 53% of SNAP recipients while four out of every five single-parent families across the country are single mother families.

Mary Davis of Minneapolis and her 15-year-old son are one such family. Living on Davis’s Social Security income of $1,100 a month due to disabilities that stem from chronic health conditions and domestic violence that left her blind in one eye, she spent the six-week shutdown consumed by worry about putting food on the table without the grocery money she relies on. To make ends meet, she considered taking out a loan or signing up for a predatory “buy now, pay later” service. Otherwise, she told the Minnesota Reformer, her only other option is to pray on it.

Situations like Davis’s are just one of the many reasons that direct, unconditional cash transfers like the $400 a month for 36 months that the Family Health Project provides to first time moms living in poverty make such a difference.

Moms who receive guaranteed and flexible income every month experience less stress about putting food on the table. And when moms have less concern about meeting their basic needs, they’re not the only ones who benefit. The neighborhoods and communities where recipients and their families live benefit, too.

Being able to better weather both the current and historically persistent SNAP Gap means that FHP families don’t have to contend with the two-week waits that have cropped up at food pantries like Boston’s Allston/Brighton Neighborhood Opportunity Center during the shutdown. Their absence from these lines leaves more for those with less.

During the government shutdown and the temporary SNAP Gap it has created and beyond, the security, flexibility, and peace of mind that guaranteed income provides is nothing short of transformational—for families, for communities, for all of us.