Jewish Charity Testifies To Congress About Hunger in US Military Families
Image by Getty
WASHINGTON (Washington Jewish Week via JTA) — The leader of a Jewish nonprofit dedicated to ending hunger in the United States and Israel told Congress that food insecurity is a significant problem among military and veteran families.
In testimony submitted Tuesday before the House Committee on Agriculture’s Subcommittee on Nutrition, Abby J. Leibman of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, said, “Across the country, service members were (and still are) showing up at food pantries, sometimes in uniform, looking for help in feeding their families.”
Leibman, MAZON’s president and CEO said, “While many emergency food providers have responded by developing specific and innovative programs to assist food-insecure military families, most of these organizations are strapped by increasing demands for services in general and have limited capacity to address this population.”
According to testimony provided by MAZON, there is a food pantry on or near every single naval and marine base in the United States.
Part of what accounts for this food insecurity is federal policies that make lower-ranking service members, especially those with families living off base or in private housing, ineligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, MAZON said. The Basic Allowance for Housing is excluded for calculating some federal programs, like WIC and Head Start, but included for others. MAZON advocates for excluding the Basic Allowance for Housing for the purpose of eligibility for all nutrition assistance programs.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
