This story was produced as part of Next City’s joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship for Rural-Urban Issues with Kentucky’s CivicLex.

“I was expecting, maybe, four of us?” Willa Johnson remarked, earning a few laughs around the table. She sat among about 20 familiar friends and new faces. Most were residents of Letcher County in southeast Kentucky. All were committed to helping their neighbors through food insecurity amid the federal government shutdown.

Two days earlier, Johnson made a post in a new mutual aid Facebook group, ‘Kinfolks Feeding Kinfolks,’ asking for locals to help fill the gap if the shutdown halted food aid benefits. She gave a statement, date, time, location and a plea to leave politics at the door.

“After the floods in 2022, we saw the very best of that neighborly love in action. Sadly, our community is facing another challenge with the freeze of SNAP food benefits,” Johnson wrote in the caption. “A group of us would love to gather and think through creative ways to help keep our neighbors fed during this time.”

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits were expected to freeze on Nov. 1, after more than a month of the federal government being shut down. After days of back-and-forth, a federal judge has ruled the Trump administration must fund the entire $8 billion cost of this month’s food access benefits, a decision the federal government is now appealing.

Leaders in Kentucky confirmed the USDA has resumed processing SNAP a week after the pause, but a top USDA official says paying these reduced SNAP benefits could take “a few weeks up to several months.” Many families still do not know how much of their normal benefits will be distributed or when payments will come. If the government shutdown continues into December, Americans may face the same crisis again.

In Kentucky, where many residents struggle to obtain fresh food, one in eight people use SNAP to cover a portion of grocery costs. More than 30% of people in some eastern Kentucky counties receive SNAP. Often, those in need are families and people with disabilities.

In absence of federal benefits, the extra weight falls on food banks and nonprofits. The Kentucky governor’s office declared a state of emergency in response to these freezes and directed $5 million from the state’s contingency fund toward Feeding Kentucky food banks. Still, the state’s largest food access programs say they’re struggling to meet the need.

“For every one meal God’s Pantry Food Bank provides, SNAP provides nine. We cannot fill this gap alone,” God’s Pantry CEO Michael Halligan wrote in a release last month. Officials with Hazel Green Food Project, a major distributor out of Wolfe County, say they don’t have the supplies to keep up.

Organizers say this situation may be unprecedented, but the state of limbo and widespread need are nothing new. Covid-19 and extreme weather events across the region have taught them to face the challenge proactively.

Nonprofits like Step By Step are using their flexibility and peer-led system to fill the gaps for young single mothers. Artfarm, in addition to providing non-food resources, is using their cooperative space to let organizers work together. And in eastern Kentucky, seasoned volunteers are pitching in to create county-wide food access plans.

Replacing mothers’ missing SNAP benefits

Jashelle hopped between tables during the Thursday Night Revive, hosted at the Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington’s Tates Creek area. It’s a weekly gathering hosted by the nonprofit Step By Step, which serves single moms ages 12-24, as well as their children.

Microphone in hand, she prompted a few of her fellow moms to share good news from their day-to-day lives. One was making good strides in potty training her child. Another secured new housing. Others celebrated simply making it through the week.

She and her fellow peer-leaders, also graduates of Step By Step’s program, cycled through regular announcements before sharing information about the anticipated SNAP pause.

Jashelle is a SNAP recipient herself. (Step By Step requested that we identify participants only by their first name to protect their privacy.) She tries to stay positive, but she says the day-by-day uncertainty weighs on her mind.

“I can’t fix their problem, and I hate that I can’t. I hate that there’s nothing that I can do for them,” Jashelle says. “But I can be here, I can be listening. Here, I can help try to provide resources, places to go to get meals.”

How many other moms in the group also use the assistance? “Probably 100% of them,” Jashelle answers.

Step By Step’s executive director, Tanya Torp, is reminded of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when workplaces and daycares closed. The only thing Step By Step was certain of then, she says, was the organization’s commitment to serving its members.

“During that time, we had the same stance that we have right now: we are going to meet their need,” says Torp. “We are so nimble that we can do that. So we raised a bunch of money, and then the city even gave us money. We kept 26 families in homes for a year. We decided to pay their bills for a year.”

Thanks to donations, grants, and their peer-led model’s flexibility, this year’s plan is the same: Step By Step will pay their members what they would receive in SNAP, alongside any existing crisis funding they receive. Step By Step is also ready to step in for WIC assistance; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children has received stopgap funding but hangs in the balance if the shutdown continues.

Torp says the needs of these young mothers are sometimes misunderstood. Financial education, she explains, can only go so far when assistance is taken away.

“These young women can tell you how to save better than you can tell them how to save. They are already stretching a dollar,” Torp says. “There’s this myth of the welfare queen. It is a complete and total fabrication. These young women are working, they are working hard, some of them [have] two and three jobs, some of them are going to school … And they need this temporary assistance, because that’s how they’re making it.”

That’s why Step By Step provides wrap-around support, Torp says. When she began in her role 12 years ago, the nonprofit was aiming to expand its faith-focused programming.

“They were all about, ‘let’s teach them Jesus.’ I came along and I was like, ‘yeah, but they don’t have a house to live in,’” Torp says.

It’s especially vital now, she adds, and these women will navigate that uncertainty alongside the community they’ve built together.

“We’re in a limbo where we don’t know – how long is this going to last? What comes next? What is going to happen if the shutdown ends?”

‘Hillbillies Helping Hillbillies’

When Willa Johnson put out the social media invitation for people to meet at the Hemphill Community Center, people came from across the aisle. Church leaders, social workers, farmers, food pantry volunteers, queer community organizers and more showed up.

EKY Mutual Aid – sometimes called Hillbillies Helping Hillbillies – responded to the impending SNAP pause by launching a separate group called ‘Feed the Kinfolks’. In the group, a couple hundred members have posted resources– food pantries, churches and other outreach programs, county by county. Other posts are recipes possible on a tight budget, maps of blessing boxes (small outdoor cabinets holding food and essentials) across the region, and even individuals offering up their own skills for mutual aid. Anything from couponing to hot meal preparation and delivery.

Last fall, Hurricane Helene tore through the southeast United States and placed multiple Kentucky counties under a state of emergency. Willa Johnson and her friend Katie Caudill volunteered with EKY Mutual Aid to distribute supplies and aid to affected communities. They did it again this past February, when heavy rainfall brought flash floods across central and eastern Kentucky.

Organizers knew they had to respond to the lapse in SNAP funding head-on, even without the fundraising efforts that supported their efforts in previous crises.

“We can’t run a distribution hub ever again,” Johnson says. “That’s really hard without the resources. But when this [SNAP pause] happened, we’re like, we have to help our neighbors– what do we do?”

So Johnson called, and the community responded. They brainstormed around the table, discussing what each learned as early as the 2022 floods that devastated most of eastern Kentucky.

“If food stamps can’t be used at IGA – which is already more expensive than Walmart, but people go to the IGA because it’s closer – then the IGA will start losing business. It will only spiral,” says Gwen Johnson [no relation], a leader with the Hemphill Community Center and a fellow organizer.

Others reflected on how residents in need are exploited. One food pantry leader shared how some of her clients got scammed to exchange their SNAP money – as much as $35, she says – for a ride to the grocery store amid heavy flooding. A lot of those bad actors came after Whitesburg, the biggest city in Letcher County, made headlines for the devastation it faced in 2022. But a lot of that fraud, Willa Johnson adds, also comes from a place of hurt.

“I think having [national] social media presence can rip a community apart, and everyone across the world is realizing what social media can do to a community,” Johnson says. “We also just live in a community where, sometimes, it’s really hard to live here. At the end of the day, we can’t turn our backs on each other.”

By the end of the night, the group decided to make comprehensive meal and pantry schedules to prevent any service gaps. They also constructed a private online group to identify needs on a case-by-case basis. Willa Johnson says the best accomplishment of the night was getting representatives from different ends of the county, from Whitesburg to Fleming-Neon to Blackey.

“It just became clear: people were hungry to be in the room together,” Johnson says.

A center for decentralized support

Beau Green says when the artist-run space artfarm’s doors opened in May, they had a similar realization.

“The paint was still pretty fresh on the walls, but it was a fun party, and a demonstration of what people were really hungry for, and ready for more of,” says Green. Green, Nick Lyell, and Max Puchalsky are cooperators at artfarm. It’s a co-op on the east side of Lexington, focused on providing a physical space for creative projects to flourish.

It’s not a literal farm, and artfarm doesn’t directly provide funding or meals. They pitch in differently. Artfarm is the physical host of menstrual drives (in collaboration with organization Mutual Menstruation) and a pay-what-you-can tool library and Toolmobile. Their Free Store is also open to the public; anyone can donate or take shelf-stable food, clothes, reproductive care items and more.

“All of these things chip away at the basic pool of resources that any individual has. Even if we’re not necessarily addressing food directly, [if we] can address the way that so many things in our lives have been commodified, we may be in a more sustainable position long term,” Green says.

Members come in for events and studio space, but something new is growing. As uncertainty around SNAP benefits looms, Green says people have increasingly used artfarm as a place to think of solutions. Their co-op structure is especially helpful, they add, in bringing together people and organizations who otherwise wouldn’t be in the same room.

“[We’re] hearing so many different organizers putting their heads together about what can be done,” Green says. “It isn’t necessarily that artfarm is going to answer all of those questions, but it can be a public living room, where organizers can share ideas and plot together.”

“Artists and organizations who share space at artfarm benefit from the cross-pollination and resource-sharing that comes with co-locating at a place like artfarm,” Lyell adds.

Some members are gearing up to host community meals. Others bring in whatever food they have to share. Even though their focus isn’t food, Puchalsky adds, it all wraps around because food is vital in keeping arts and culture alive.

“We’re not trying to be a centralized space that is controlling everything, but contributing to something that’s larger than what we are here … What do you say to a communal farm who’s feeding people? ‘Where’s the housing?’ Finding ways for many different people in spaces to play many different roles.”

Puchalsky adds that nothing they do is especially innovative. Mutual aid, he says, is a new name for simply helping other people.

This post was originally published on Next City.