The director of Montgomery County’s Office of Food Systems Resilience knows that the area is expensive and access to high quality (yet affordable) food can be lacking. That’s why her agency is planning on giving local families a helping hand.
“It’s just very expensive to live here and putting food on the table is often a choice to do that or pay rent,” said Heather Bruskin. “In Montgomery County, we have over 300,000 families that live below what we call the ‘self-sufficiency standard.’ Their incomes are not sufficient to make ends meet.”
Bruskin told WTOP that a lot of families in Montgomery County live in a “SNAP Gap,” the gap between those eligible to enroll in SNAP and those actively enrolled in it.
“They earn too much to qualify for nutrition assistant programs like SNAP, but don’t make enough to make ends meet. There needs to be a way to support those families with local dollars. Most of those families are families where people are working two jobs, they might be single-caregiver households, they might be people that rely on public transportation to get to and from work and may spend a lot of time commuting. These families really benefit from a program like ‘MC Groceries,'” Bruskin said.
On Thursday, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich alongside county council members and Casey Aden-Wansbury, vice president of policy and government affairs for Instacart Health, were at the Sprouts Farmers Market in Burtonsville to launch “MC Groceries,” a new initiative to increase food security and address childhood hunger across Montgomery County.
Each participating family in the program will receive a monthly “Fresh Funds” stipend to shop for groceries available on Instacart. Families will receive $100 per month per child — up to a maximum monthly stipend of $400 for households with four or more children — for a full year.
“These benefits allow them to shop on the Instacart platform, either the website or the app, for approved food and beverage items,” said Bruskin.
“In Montgomery County we work (with) 80 different retailers. Every participant in this program will have at least 20 retail stores to choose from,” said Aden-Wansbury. “MC Groceries is a groundbreaking program that brings together Instacart’s technology and reach with the county’s expertise and resources to help fight childhood hunger.”
Roughly 600 Montgomery County income-verified families are in the first group of participants, supporting nearly 1,500 children in total.
MC Groceries was developed in alignment with the County’s Strategic Plan to End Childhood Hunger.
During the event, Elrich started his speech by saying, “Things like these are events that we all can be proud of. It says a lot about Montgomery County that we are doing this.”
Elrich told WTOP that he learned a lot about the effects of hunger on children from his time as an elementary school teacher.
“The moment that brought it home for me — I had this kid that was sitting in his chair Monday morning and he was crying. He was crying because he was hungry. He has not eaten since Friday. It’s heartbreaking to see that. There are people that the two meals at school are the two meals they get that day even in Montgomery County,” said Elrich.
